Lost in the Pacific

This hour and a half 'plane' wreck can be summarized by: terrible script, poor story, not one endearing character, atrocious acting across the board, mediocre CGI, and silly premise and irrelevant sub-plots. Another embarrassing flop coming out of China's film industry... Anyone with a bit of cash is a producer and film maker nowadays. There's apparently an over abundance of cash and arrogance to finance mindless crap like this... The mentality seems to be: How hard could it be?! Heck, we've taken some film making classes--maybe even got a few friends and/or relatives with some ancillary degrees in "entertainment." Thus, let's just hire a bunch of pretty faces and third rate actors. No need to worry about the writing, special effects, continuity and pacing, artistic values, plot and character development, English speech coaches, and least of all, the audience's intelligence and sensibility!

Well people, another day, another crappy movie hitting our shores. Actually, this was filmed on our shores – Pinewood Iskandar Studios in Johor, to be exact, so I guess that's something. That's about it for the praises.

If writer-director Vincent Zhou intended for this to show the world what Chinese cinema is made of, he has failed. The People's Republic has been kind to cineastes and mainstream movie-goers alike in the past decade, ranging from the beautifully thought-provoking (Jia Zhangke's "A Touch of Sin"), to the big and bombastic (John Woo's mega-blockbuster "Red Cliff"), even veering off into the hysterical (Stephen Chow's recent "The Mermaid"). They do not need to cater to Western audiences at all – rather, it is the Western bigwigs that need to learn how to market these films properly. After all, if Ang Lee's "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" can gross over US$100 million in the United States alone, why can't others, right?

Alas, my plea falls on deaf ears, and here we are, relegated to a C- movie starring struggling actors and made by a filmmaker who apparently conceded to the "everyone-watches-only-English-movies" mentality. Imagine a Muppet Babies version of "Snakes on a Plane" and TV's "Lost" meshed together in an unholy mess; sprinkle some stilted English dialogue ("She died so horribLE. .. so tragicALLY") and some truly bad and overdone VFX, the kind that's as half-assed as those in "A Sound of Thunder" if not worse. In this day and age, are mutant cats scary at all, especially if they look like an evil version of Jiji from "Kiki's Delivery Service"?

Hell, the film even goes so far as to hiring attractive Chinese stars like Zhang YuQi to dress up the nonexistent plot (she tries, dammit), but I must confess, dear reader, to feeling a little sad for still-hunky ex-Superman Brandon Routh, who's film career is relegated to thankless roles such as this - a nonsensical riff on Steven Seagal's "Under Siege" character. Was "Superman Returns" really that toxic?

Sci-Fi Channel this ain't.

I don't know how much they pay Brandon Routh, it must be A LOT for him to participate in this terrible "movie".

Vincent Zhou's last "movie": "Last Flight" starring Ed Westwick, had the exact same plot.

They are the same movie. With the same exact plot. They have the same problems: inconsistent plot line, incoherent script, poor story development, terrible CGI, terrible set, and idiotic lines for characters.

I wonder how much they paid Brandon Routh and Ed Westwick for these terrible project.

Actors please have more taste and guts. Say "no" to stupid Chinese movies.

Well that is an hour or so of my life that I will never get back. The best thing about it is the plane itself.

I don't think I have ever seen such a trashy film. Average CGI effects when you consider how the quality in other films these days, this just looks as if it was 1980 standards. Appalling acting by virtually all the cast and a dreadful script.

At some points when they are "interacting" with each other it is almost as if they are not side by side because there is just no chemistry between any of them.

I find it hard to believe that when people are offered a role in a film that they would have considered saying yes to this one.

This Zhou production is worst. I never ever have experienced something that bad. Let's hope Chinese don't make more of this amateurish movies. Everything in this film is so unbelievable wrong. Story, acting, computer animation are all too stupid for anyone > 5 years old. Therefore I won't spill more words than necessary to warn you all not giving this movie any chance for watching. You most likely will regret watching this, so ignore it and all forthcoming stuff from Zhou, students of any film academy do it so much better. It was like my toes couldn't relax in my socks and stayed frozen until the last minute. I was shocked how bad this movie was and I couldn't believe my own eyes. But I kept watching and I couldn't avoid many laughs... Probably a cartoon version would have been even more fun. And what a waste of money and time. Maybe re-education of all Chinese masters involved in this production could be a solution? And ignore all positive reviews here, as they are the proof of a bad taste.