Le vaisseau fantôme

David Jason is brilliant. Sadly a good actor cannot salvage an obvious story line (which owes a lot to other works, such as the similarly named Ghostship) which meant it all became a little predictable, and towards the end just plain silly.

Characters behave inconsistently and illogically as the story lurches towards the less than surprising end.

The special effects themselves were also erratic - obviously a lot of money was spent on the set of the sub, but the cgi shots ranged from the okay to dreadful.

Okay if you are bored, but not the great work I was expecting.

A derivative but nonetheless intriguing set up; a ship (in this case a submarine) is found many years after it sank, with no sign of the crew, or what happened to them. This has been done many times, it is essentially the story of the Marie Celeste. Despite that the set up hooked me, I love these kind of vaguely supernatural / time travel plot lines, however familiar they are.

To be honest I was disappointed by what was delivered. David Jason is a fine actor but his character in this came over as terse, sullen and not especially interesting. As he is the lead, and therefore your focal point throughout the story, this was a big failing. He just wasn't interesting or unusual enough, you learned almost nothing about his character despite him being on screen for most of the 180 minutes.

The plot itself seemed to peter out rather than deliver a climax, for a thriller (or at least a war time drama) I felt there was too little tension. The actual operation of the submarine and the technical side all felt very authentic but this did not compensate for the lack of plot, or genuinely interesting characters. The officers were all a little stiff, the crew were similarly generic, all of them have been seen many times before.

Towards the end I felt the plot simply ran out of ideas and some of what happened bordered on silly. The story seemed to flirt with the premise it had created, rather than really go into it. I never felt this story got going, I appreciate it was television but there was far too much chatter. It was slow in places where it needed pace, or another twist and this was, for me at least, the other major failing; ultimately the story lacked imagination. What Ghostboat delivered was almost exactly what you expected, no more. There was no moment when I thought 'now that is interesting, I never saw that coming'.

Despite these misgivings I thought it was not bad for a TV two parter. It was ambitious and though it failed to hit the target it was at the very least something different.

Sometimes, watching standard and not particularly famous movie, you stumble on a real gem. Ghostboat tells a story used in many films. A ship/submarine falls into a time tunnel... but in this movie things are much better done. The story captivates the viewer, although the plot is predictable, it is not boring. The directing and acting is perfect. Worth every minute of watching. I didn't know David Jason as an actor, but half the fun of the movie is his performance.

Of course the effects are not the best quality and there are many scenes which look as from cheap b-movie but this is not multydolar production.

I don't tend to watch a lot of television (preferring to stick to DVDs) so something has really got to interest me to get me to firstly remember the programme's on and secondly to actually watch.

The thing that immediately attracted me to the programme was, of course, fabulous actor David Jason. And yet again he excels himself in this wonderful thriller.

The story is based on a book also called 'Ghostboat' and is about a submarine called the Scorpion that surfaces in 1981-but which hasn't been seen since the second world war where it was presumed to have sunk. When it sank only one survivor was found, Jack Hardy (David Jason) who can't remember anything due to amnesia) When the sub resurfaces, Hardy is invited to go on a journey on the sub, with another crew and retrace the path the Scorpion took to find out what happened to it.

When they first go onto the sub to check out the damage and pull out the bodies of the dead, they find something astonishing. There are no bodies, everything is as the crew left it 40 years ago, nothing has changed.

And so the journey begins. Hardy can hear voices, things are happening in the same way they did 40 years ago-and the crew are beginning to change. As Hardy says 'The past is breaking through' The CGI effects in the film are very, very good, although not perfect, the storyline is gripping, the acting and cast are stellar.

The perfect thing for the family to gather in front of the telly to watch-10/10!

I just finished watching this ITV production, and all I can say is that I liked what I saw, but will note that there was room for much improvement.

How so? Well, for one, the main vessel around which the movie focuses was a World War 2 British diesel submarine. Big deal, you say, ah, but one of the major story points is that the sub seems to operate like a modern nuclear sub, or one of the modern Nordic or Germanic subs which are quieter than either the US, UK or Soviet subs. Simply put WW2 subs stayed on the surface, and only went underwater when needed, but you'd never know that by watching this movie.

The other thing is that there's a little bit of creep factor in this film, but it's not accentuated enough. We understand what's happening to the crew, but the made for TV production values seem to limit both SFX and other production values to really ram home the message to the audience.

I imagine the biggest mis step taken in this film is that even though the boat as a "life of its own" so to speak, a late 20th century crew, a crew that is not trained in diesel sub operations some how manages to bring this vessel out into open ocean, and operate her like a modern nuclear powered SSN.

Huh.

You know, if you can get by that, and the cinematography which is a little uninspired, then you can probably enjoy watching this film, but the story of a haunted ship and her affect on the crew takes precedence over operational details and plot points.

It's not a great film, but it is a mild diversion for a couple of hours. Give it a shot.