Dante 01

I really wanted to like this film, since I've had good luck with French flicks lately as well as being interested in the neat little cast assembled here. Among them are Lambert Wilson (the Merovingian himself) and Dominique Pinon (Delicatessen, Amelie, etc...). Mix in a little Cube, throw in a dash of Alien 3 and sprinkle in some Powder for good measure and you have the undercooked hodgepodge of Dante 01. Good sci-fi is hard to come by these days, mainly because I think it's the most high concept genre of film as well as the hardest to execute really well. Unfortunately, despite some very interesting ideas and good production values, it doesn't add up to much of anything when it was all over. Wilson's main character has almost zero lines in the film and isn't really even a main character. If you're going to have your main character remain essentially silent, that's fine, but for the love of Odin please make him interesting. I completely understood what was going on, but it just didn't register with me as much as I was hoping it would. There is a sequence just before the last shot of the film with Wilson outside in space that was just so agonizingly excessive that I was swearing at the screen for it to stop, which I hardly ever do. Maybe you'll have a different opinion, which is fine. But for me, no dice.

Now... Let's be honest ... Caro has never been able to get his head round a narrative ... Delicatessen and City of Lost Children were both wonderful to look at, but were a complete mess when it came to pacing and narrative ... This is so typical today when most of these cinema directors come from Television ... And making ADVERTS ... What we get is loads of flash, but no real substance This film even manages to fail on that front ... It looks cheap ... The story is all over the place ... And in the end it just turns into 2010,only not as good ... Which, lets be honest, wasn't the greatest piece of cinema I'm reading a lot about financial problems with the production etc... But quite frankly, however much money you throw at something it is going to be crap if there isn't a decent idea in the first place... AND THERE WASN"T : )

So, there is this space prison filled with bald criminals...heard this one before? Corporate scientist Elisa (Linh Dan Pham) arrives on a prison ship with plans of using the felons as guinea pigs for a new DNA altering serum. Also arriving on the shuttle is new prisoner St. Georges (Lambert Wilson). Quickly thrown into the tiny populace, the prisoners notice something is not right with the new inmate when he begins miraculously healing other inmates.

Marc Caro - co-director of the DELICATESSEN and THE CITY OF LOST CHILDREN - makes his long awaited return to feature film-making but, unfortunately, this seems a step back. The film is visually stunning but the religious allegory heavy plot doesn't do it any favors as Caro seems to be mimicking 2001 and SOLARIS. This moves along at a pretty deliberate pace until an ending pops up that will make you scramble for the DVD menu, thinking you've inadvertently skipped a chapter. It literally comes out of nowhere and you can almost hear the money men pulling out of the project (reportedly last minute financial woes forced Caro to change his original ending). Interestingly, the US DVD has a 30-minute "making of" extra and co-writer Pierre Bordage mentions this was a project originally developed for Alejandro Jodorowsky. There is a great cast including DELICATESSEN lead Dominique Pinon and DELLAMORTE co-star François Hadji-Lazaro.

Not a bad film, just not a good film. Started off strong, but ended poorly. A great first effort by the director - shows a lot of promise. The acting was pretty weak overall, but the material was thin. The production was pretty good for a cheap sci-fi.

The Christian symbolism was laid on so thick you could actually smell it. It wasn't even symbolism - it was iconography. Some christians and non-christians alike will find it offensive or tedious for that reason. It is hard to promote any given religion in a film without coming off lame.

Hope we see more sci-fi from France.

Boring.. DISAPOINTED! NOT RECCOMMENDED. WATCH is 90s work. maybe Jeunet is key for cinematography. darkly shot. not much for ambience that work for me, minimalist environment decoration- uninspired filming-direction I red that they run out of budget.