alandavidmckenzie

The BluRay cover states "one of the best movies of the century."

That is a very bold claim.

Top ten? No.

Top 50? No

I would personally argue maybe top 100, but even that might be a stretch.

This film had a tremendous amount of hype surrounding it when it first came out, so I had relatively high expectations. Having read many books on the Manhattan Project, I was expecting a lot more detail and historical facts. In many respects the storyline felt dumbed down, perhaps in an attempt to attract a wider audience. I felt short changed by the end, and although I thought it was a good movie overall, I'd much rather read a book like Annie Jacobson's " The Pentagon's Brain" if I want to explore this topic.

This movie does some things right. It uses IMAX cameras in unorthodox ways that have never been done before, and it really makes the black and white scenes pop. It also embodies the class that old successful movies used to have, like A Beautiful Mind and Cinderella Man. That being said, this movie is 3 hours long, and it's not because there's so much story to tell. In fact, I was disappointed with the amount of storytelling given the subject. The filmmaker rather obsessed on many slow frame rate segments and scenes, and there's an abundance of time spent just doing still frames of Cillian Murphy's face up close. This adds not seconds, but minutes to scenes that could have been better utilized to tell important parts of the story. This is a very grand and big story, and this movie strangely minimizes the grandness of what was going on at the time. The Manhattan Project had 130'000 people working on it at the peak of the operation. This movie makes it seem tiny in comparison, and even the Alamos Texas scenes don't accurately represent the true scale of the operation.

I hate to say this, but the enormous success of this film seems like more of a marketing success. Hollywood and media have gotten very good at convincing people that something is much better than it really is, and I feel like this is one of those cases.

It's very hard to pull off a new concept and do it well. Like Inception and The Matrix, I was initially intrigued by the concept of this story and got into it. The beginning of the movie had that intrinsic quality that makes you curious and excites the mind. Unfortunately the idea and visual parlor tricks wear off pretty quick as you start to see and spot the many flaws in the script. It probably would have been a good idea to hire a consultant who teaches chaos theory, quantum field theory and space-time. A lot of the story simply devolves into a bunch of shooting and explosions, and stays from the initial unanswered questions about space-time. If you are going to inject and tackle a scientific subject like this, you'd better know what you're doing, or it just becomes a big incoherent mess, which is probably why there are such a wide range of conflicting reviews of this film.

As a Mario fan from the age of 4, having played virtually every game, I thought maybe my expectations were perhaps too high. But upon further reflection, it is clear that Hollywood just keeps setting the bar lower and lower.

It's a crying shame that the story is soo hollow and bland. Soo much of this movie was done right. The cinematics, the texture mapping, the lighting, the sounds. This could have been a real gem if not for the script writing and voice actor selections.

Nintendo loves to stick with what works and they're very resistant to change. It's quite surprising that they would veer soo far off course with the voice actors given what we're all accustomed to. The only person I thought represented the character well was Jack Black.

What baffles me is how this was the final product given the 40 years of material they had to work with. In some respects The Angry Birds Movie was a better execution, and they had barely any back story to work with.

At the end of the day, Nintendo played it safe, and as a brand that used to be known for taking chances (Wii controllers, dual screen consoles, and even Virtual Boy), it's really sad to see them produce such a mediocre product.

I have faith in their abilities to continue making fantastic games with memories that will last a lifetime. I would suggest if this is their best attempt to bring their games to the big screen, perhaps they should rethink that avenue.