georgethetee

If you are totally infatuated, OTT and obsessed with Jodie Foster, then this is definately the film for you. If you are just a fan, or you just like her, or are actually rather indifferent to her, it isn't.

Most of this long, long film are taken up with close-up shots of her face. Yes, there are other characters, Tom Skerritt, etc, but they are there only to give the appearance, the impression, that this is a bona fide movie, and not a video eulogy to her. The story is the usual implausible aliens cliche, complete with the inevitable clips of Hitler ranting which apparently always obsesses aliens so. Special effects are good, though limited. At one point I was fascinated by a colourful nebula; that lasted 2.4 seconds, then it was back to close-ups of Jodie.

And, during some of those long, silent close-ups, it occurred to me that Jodie Foster is not exactly the most beautiful face ever seen on celluloid, in fact far from it. Still, if we had to stare at Kournikova for two hours solid, no doubt her charms might start to wane too.

This is a film for which you will never see a 'Director's Cut'. Clearly the director was given carte blanche to indulge his mania for Foster's face, and the idea of cutting any of that out was anathema to him.

See this film and every contour, every crease of Jodie Foster's face will be etched in your mind forever

This movie is an involving, intriguing and ultimately poignant heist thriller. Since the advent of a comedy TV show which took it's name, the TV Guides have taken to describing this film as a 'comedy'. Obviously they've never watched it - the moral is, get your movie info from IMDB, not a rubbish newspaper or magazine TV Guide.

The movie's premise is good - a disenchanted ex-army officer dispairs of success on 'civvy street' so decides to organize his own squad of former soldiers and pull off a military operation with a difference - they will rob a bank. This film was the inspiration to the real-life Great Train Robbery, which involved a 20-man gang stealing £3,500,000 in 1963.

Characterization is good and believable; as with all British movies of the era, there is an excrutiating tendency to overly-ingenious rhetoric, one wonders sometimes how they think of such witty remarks. That aside, it's thoroughly convincing. The film code of the day of course required that no film could ever show a criminal benefiting from his crime, but instead of the usual tiresome accidental spilling of the booty out of a train/car/plane window, we have a more realistic, and indeed somewhat sad resolution.

Yes, it is a bit old now, but if you can hang-up your hang-ups about that, you may find yourself pleasantly surprised.

The first scene is one of the most effective and dramatic I have ever seen: an innuit fisherman observes an asteroid crash to earth and must flee with his huskies from it's tsunami.

Breathtaking, but quite honestly you could switch off right then, from there on it's not so much downhill as subterranean.

Gabriel Byrne, Jim Broadbent, Richard Harris and other familiar (some all too familiar) faces are here, mostly playing their usual stock characters; there is really no real acting as such. The main problem is the... er... shall we say, heroine. She is trying to discover who murdered an immigrant innuit boy. People help her, open up and reveal their secrets and suspicions but all the time she is this cold, butch ice maiden standing there cold as ice and you really wonder why people don't tell her to take a run.

How she herself came to care what happened to the boy is a mystery, this girl never cared for or about anything in her life. One suspects the producers started with a viable script, then someone thought "Hey, why don't we make her a real, hard butch bitch." So they did, and it doesn't work. Shame