Piggy6756

I also think this film is far better than its reviews suggest. The photography, for one thing, is beautiful, showcasing as it does the North West American wilderness.

More than this, and the reason why I cut the film a great deal of slack, is its moral core. Costner's character, at a difficult point in his life in this dystopian future, discovers a wrecked mail van, puts on the dead driver's jacket, and decides to deliver the mail to the nearest community as a way to scrounge a meal and a bed for the night. Quite against his expectations he strikes a chord with the community he visits, and they give him mail to deliver to their loved ones whom they have not spoken to in years. So he starts a mail service for his own benefit, but as he brings people messages from people they thought were dead he also brings them hope that life will get better and in the process he becomes a better man.

There is a violent conclusion to the movie, but it is not the violence that revives the community but someone bringing people closer together via the mail. For that reason in particular I look kindly on this movie.

A divorced British cancer specialist, Dr. Will Self (Bob Peck) travels to China in 1989 to track down a Chinese doctor who has published ground-breaking research into the disease. His search proves difficult, for this doctor has fallen foul of the Communist regime, and they would rather he were not found. Dr Self, however, is persistent, for he is driven not primarily by intellectual curiosity but by the grief he still suffers for his own young son, who has died of cancer, despite all of his own medical skills.

In the course of his search he unexpectedly finds love, and a measure of healing for his soul, and his experience mirrors the rising tide of hope for China as the democracy movement takes wing. But tragedy is to come in the bloody crackdown at Tiananmen Square.

Bob Peck turns in a superb portrayal of emotional pain held in by English middle class restraint that is reminiscent of his character in 'Edge of Darkness' and underlines what a sad loss to the acting profession was his early death from cancer, that bloody awful disease.

I also fondly remember this series (I am 48). I think it was one of the earliest TV shows that presented British intelligence agents not as square-jawed heroes but as ruthless operators prepared to resort to any measure to eliminate enemies of the state. Glyn Owen's character was the conscience of the team, agonising over how to reconcile each dirty mission with his own moral code, and how to extract himself from an organisation that did not countenance resignation. Counterpoised against him was Gerald Flood as a cold-blooded assassin.

The series also operated against the background of the British class system, with Owen's character the working-class ex-policeman with a heart of gold, and Gerald Flood the urbane, mannered ex-public schoolboy with the granite centre. Excellent stuff!