marttisarkia

I saw this movie yesterday evening and it's definitely one of the best scifi-action-adventure movies ever made!!! Before I went to the cinema, I'd heard that the film contains a lot of blood and guts and it might be unsuitable for some people. I agree with this, but at least for me it was far from a too violent movie, because the gore scenes are quite gritty and blurry. This is why I'm honesty recommending this to the majority of adults. It has so much to offer.

First: the plot. Despite you've seen the trailers and read the synopsis, the plot has many twists to surprise you. And unlike in the case of 24, the twists are pretty reasonable and humane. Besides, it's not hard to recognize the connection between the alien community problem and the global social issues of the real world (just think about this after watching the movie).

Second: the CGI's. This is probably the first film including so realistic CGI effects that they are actually hard to separate from the "real" objects. Also, the rugged documentary-like picture enhances this vision very well. Nonetheless, the explosions and the other such visual effects were cutting edge. Still, I was a bit surprised to see that the film wasn't completely shot in this documentary-like manner, though only some individual scenes were.

Third: the action sequences weren't presented too frequently and that's why they worked so effectively. Despite this I didn't find myself bored in any part of the movie, probably because the action scenes were highly intensive and simply super-exciting!

Fourth: Sharlto Copley. This guy was incredible. He played his character (Wikus van de Merwe) extremely well, which reminded me of Borat (by Sacha Baron Cohen): so innocent and well-meaning person, but still people see him as a goofy (which appears to be a false assumption, when it's about his survival). But maybe the most impressive thing about him was the South African accent, it's simply unforgettable when you hear him swearing (and that's what you'll going to hear a lot in this movie).

The only thing that bothered me a bit, was "the overwhelming necessary evil" character that they had to include to the movie for some mysterious reason. Maybe this will make it look more Hollywood style, but still I think it's a bad cliché.

Bottom line: don't miss this film, if you respect good scifi entertainment. It's like the Lord of the Rings of science fiction movies, one of the best movies of it's genre. Last, but not least: respect for the co-operation of Neill Blomkamp and Peter Jackson.

I won the tickets from a competition and when I went to the cinema, I was quite suspicious. I mean, the plot sounded just too cliché and ordinary comedy story and the main actors (Mikko Leppilampi and Pamela Tola) are still pretty unexperienced as actors. Still, there was some hope left that this could really be something fine entertainment, and it really was.

The film is full of talented side actors, for example Outi Mäenpää (as Raakel), Sari Havas (as a disturbed writer), Risto Kaskilahti (as an angry mixer) and Juha Veijonen (as an actor who fell in love with Ilona). I think all the actors succeeded very well, especially Mäenpää, but maybe the most surprising role in the whole film was Jukka Puotila's act as a taxi driver: I haven't seen Puotila in any role for a while and he made perhaps the funniest scene in the whole movie. It was also a great idea to bring real television drama actors like Pete Lattu and Venla Saartamo, which both were acting in Salatut elämät TV series, to play a role to this kind of movie. I was very surprised when I noticed that some real musician like Zarkus Poussa had got a role to play a funny sound effect man with imaginary ways to create any sound.

The idea of making a soap opera in a movie worked well. The overacted emotions and the nonsense lines made me laugh time after time during the film so that I had sometimes troubles to follow the plot itself. The movie isn't clever, but so what! It doesn't even try to be anything like that. And that's why the whole idea works very well. I have to thank also Aleksi Bardy for making the movie better than it would have been without him: Bardy has written besides this movie some drama series for instance Käenpesä, and this is another reason why the idea of this movie works so well.

In spite of all this, Saippuaprinssi isn't a perfect film. As the director said before the beginning of the movie in the cinema, the comedy is a hard sort of art. It's much harder to make a good comedy film than a good "wannabe clever mystery" film, I suppose. Anyway, this is a Finnish comedy movie I've been waiting for long time, and I really enjoyed it.