Reviews

Rik Mayall and Adrian Edmundson have been playing these two characters in one form or another for many years and many incarnations, from the Dangerous Brothers, The Young Ones, Filthy Rich and Catflap, to Bottom...etc, they are always two sleazy, ultra-violent, uber-slapstick, childish loosers. In my view this movie represents this concept at it's brilliant best.

In this movie They play two relentlessly alcoholic slime-balls who's sole goal in life is to make it to the next drink. Two more unsuited "Dreamtime Escorts" you would struggle to find! The Comic Strip franchise produced a wide variety of film types from very subtle to the outrageous, and this movie perfectly represents the later end of that spectrum. In my opinion it is one of the better Comic Strip movies, ranking up there with the other greats such as Bad News and Five Go Mad in Dorest.

The presence of the legendary Peter Cook, appearing as Mr Jolly, adds to the movie's significance in the series.

If you like your humour subtle then this is not a movie for you. If you like a good simple, unsophisticated, childish, cartoon style of humour, and laugh at things such as Eddie trying to light his burps, and Rik knocking back pints of vodka then this movie is for you. Sometimes it is good to laugh at something refreshingly childish! This movie never fails to cheer me up.

Being a fan of British naval history, and also a fan of Anthony Hopkins, I love this film. I think it is severely under-rated. The acting (particularly by Hopkins) is superb, and the cinematography and realism are stunning.

Unlike some of the previous comments for this film I think it is pretty loyal to the true historical facts of the real mutiny. Alright, there are a few minor changes to fact, but nothing that radically alters the story. Basically Bligh was a very able and fair captain, who was let down by incompetent officers. Bligh was no more a monster than any other Royal Navy captains, the difference was other Royal Navy Captains had able commissioned officers and a squad of marines to back up their authority. Bligh was on his own, because the admiralty insisted on saving money on the bread-fruit expedition by giving Bligh a small ship and no officers. (All the officers on board were non-commissioned warrant officers, who were not employed by the Royal Navy but were in it for their own advancement, Blight was the only Royal Navy officer). This is what ultimately led to the mutiny. Bligh had no one he could rely on to back up his orders from the Admiralty. Bligh was actually an exponent of modern thinking, and treated his men with much more humanity than other Royal Navy Captains. He had learnt his trade from sailing under Captain Cook.

I think Hopkins manages to capture this in his performance. Bligh was a professional man, who grew increasingly frustrated by the incompetence and laziness of his officers. Hopkins manages to convey this sense of increasing irritation brilliantly. He felt particularly let down by Fletcher Christian, who was his friend and whom he had personally advanced up the ranks. He expected Fletcher to back up his orders, but Fletcher was more interested in his own pleasure with the Tahitian women.

On the journey out the crew were actually very happy and contented, but the trouble began when the crew began to experience the liberties and freedoms of Tahitian life, and they did not want to leave it. Bligh had to force the men to go back to their duty, and instead of having officers to back him up, the officers took the side of the men.

I think the script of this film captures the true story quite well. I saw the Clark Gable version of the story many years ago, and the only thing I remember is the portrayal of Bligh as an irrational monster, with none of the reasons behind his anger explained. In this version I feel Hopkins is more like the real Bligh. An able commander trying to carry out his orders, but let down by those around him.

The confrontation between Bligh and Christian in the captain's cabin the day before the mutiny is one of my favourite movie scenes of all time. Hopkins performance of the captain at the end of his patience is just outstanding. `Oh there are rumblings are there?'. Superb!

The only down side to this film is Mel Gibson. I can't stand the sight of him! Mind you, even he manages to pull of a good performance.

The film ends quite abruptly, with a lot of loose ends. The most fascinating parts of the true story come after the end of the film. I guess the time constraints of the film mean they had to concentrate on just the story of the mutiny.

The mutineers set up a colony on Pitcairn, and ended up all murdering each other until only one survived (Jack Adams). Those that stayed on Tahiti were captured two years later by HMS Pandora which had been dispatched after Bligh got back to England. This ship rounded up about 16 mutineers, and on the way home the Pandora hit a reef off Australia and sunk. The crew had to make an open boat journey to Coupang, the same port that Bligh's life boat had arrived at two years earlier!!

Meanwhile Bligh was promoted and sent off on another Breadfruit exhibition to Tahiti, this time the Admiralty gave him commissioned officers and a squad of marines. This mission succeeded.

When the Breadfruit plants finally reached the slave colonies in the West Indies, the slaves refused to eat the fruit as they disliked the taste. That's irony for you!

I have never been a huge fan of Bond films (I have always found them too cartoonish and too far removed from reality), but I was dragged along to see 'The World is Not Enough' and actually enjoyed it and was impressed with Brosnan and the film.

I went along to 'Die Another Day' with the same high expectations and was greatly disappointed. It was once again a shameless cartoon with ridiculous stunts, stupid locations, no dialogue, a completely un-plausible plot. It was purely a vehicle for stunt-men and special effects guys to show off their profession. During the endless action scenes I just got bored and switched off from what was happening, then I completely lost what the plot was supposed to be.

I think Brosnan is the best actor ever to have played Bond, and it is a shame to see him being wasted on such unchallenging trash. I would like to see the Bond character being a bit more in touch with reality.

I have always thought the whole '00' agent thing, and the history behind it could be a fascinating part of the character that could be explored. I mean, they have never made any attempt in the films to justify the fact that James Bond is still the same age after 40 years! They act as if he is supposed to be the same man as Sean Connery. I think it would be more realistic if they made some reference in the films to former 'James Bonds'. i.e. the name James Bond 007 is just an agent identity that is filled by different agents over the years. They could even bring back Roger Moore into a film playing a senior MI6 director to hint that he retired from the 'Bond' identity and is now MI6 top brass. For example, Connery's and Moore's characters probably retired, and Lazenby and Dalton might have been killed in action. You could have Connery, Moore and Brosnan all in the same scene, now that would be an interesting movie!!

I started watching this film and enjoyed the first half hour or so. I was impressed with the way it was shot and the way the story started to develop. There were some early indication that it might be a poor attempt to update the classic 'Get Carter', but those fears were soon quelled by the completely different style.

However, this was all before Terrence Stamp started to speak. Don't get me wrong, Terrence Stamp is a fine actor and I have been very impressed with some of his past work, but as any Englishman (or Limey) will soon be able to tell, he is no Londoner. His accent is a laughable caricature of a cockney. I thought he was going to break into a rendition of a Mary Poppins song at any moment. When he referred to someone as ' my new china plate' in his 'I'm such a cockney gangster' accent I nearly fell of my chair laughing. No real Londoners talk like that! Terrence Stamp's accent comes from the educated classes of Middle England, and his attempt at a London accent sounds terribly forced. If they had got a real Londoner to play the part, such as Bob Hoskins or Michael Caine, then I would have enjoyed the film a lot more.

I would have thought an actor of Stamp's abilities would normally have been able to cope with accents. I can only assume that the producers got him to play up the accent to caricature levels to enable the American audience to distinguish that he is supposed to be a London hard type, rather than a polite 'Oxbridge' type. Those seem to be the only two types of Englishman that Americans recognise. I guess it is similar to the fact that I wouldn't be able to tell the difference between a New York accent and a Texas accent, unless they were highly caricatured.

I guess if you are not English this film would be enjoyable. If you are English then try to stop laughing!

Being a fan of the original movie and a Tim Burton fan I was very much looking forward to this movie. Then I read the early reviews coming out of the States and almost didn't go to see it because of the criticism, but I decided to go to make up my own mind.

I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised, it was nowhere near as bad as I was expecting. There are a few things that let the plot down and stretch credibility, but then you have to expect that with science fiction movies. Why would they be using monkeys to pilot probes, when even now they have automated ones? Why does the Chimp's pod turn up at that exact minute when it has been missing for thousands of years?? You just have to suspend your dis-belief and go along with the story. If you can do that then you will probably enjoy it. Let's face it, the original doesn't stand up to any degree of scientific analysis either, so why analyse this one?

There has been a lot of talk about the endding, to me it made perfect sense, I don't see what all the whining is about. It is obvious that he has gone foward into the future of the same planet, he never went back to Earth. Thade has obviously made a comeback and has lead the apes in a reconquest of the planet, and they have now developed technology (perhaps with the help of the data banks on the ship, now that they know they are there). Simple as that. Why are people getting confused and thinking he went back to earth?? That really would make no sense at all!

The only strange thing about the ending, is why oh why didn't he stay with Estella Warren! She wanted him, and he left!! Now that really does stretch credibility!

Another interesting thing is that there appear to be several species of apes (Gorillas, Chimps and Orang-Utangs as far as I can tell), and yet they all get along fine and live under the banner 'Ape'. Surely to a Chimp a Gorilla would be as alien as a human! After all humans are a species of ape as well! It seems that this movie is displaying the old human arrogance that there are humans in one catagory, and the whole animal kingdom in the other and that we are the superior. I think it far more likely that each species would hate all the others, just as we see in nature. But that would make the movie far to complicated!

This film opened this weekend in the UK, and I had been eagerly awaiting it's release, being a huge fan of the genre. I was very excited about the prospect of a film portraying the real story of the battle of Stalingrad, complete with gritty drama and the benefit of the realism of recent films like ‘Saving Private Ryan'. I had read some of the slightly critical reviews from the US where it had been showing for some weeks, but was sure that I would love it anyway. After seeing the film I have to say I agree with the detractors! It is a huge disappointment, it could have been so much, but fails to live up to it's potential.

The first half-hour of the film is worthy of the subject, and portrays the huge drama and sacrifice of the battle. The young Russian soldiers are forced at gunpoint to walk towards the German guns with no weapons, and no chance of survival, just to die as a useless waste. The Russians still used WWI tactics and only their sheer numbers won the day for them.

The film then quickly descends into a shambolic attempt to make us care about a Russian sniper (who let's face it are not very heroic figures anyway), and the love triangle he gets caught up in. The acting in some of the scenes is absolutely abysmal. I found myself cringing at some of the cheesy lines, which sounded like the actors were reading them off an auto-cue. I have to agree with the US reviewers who criticise the accents of the actors. I thought it wouldn't bother me as I am used to seeing films where Germans and Russians talk with American accents, so I though I wouldn't notice the English accents. But I have to say that even as an Englishman I thought the accents were simply laughable. Especially Jude Law who had a slightly cockney twang to his accent, presumably to portray the fact that he was more working class than Joseph Fiennes who spoke with an Oxbridge accent. The only actors who come through unscathed are Bob Hoskins in his passable portrayal of Krushchev, and Ed Harris as Major Konig who is by far the best performer in the film. For some reason a German with an American accent is more believable than a Russian with a cockney accent! When two of the main characters who we are supposed to care about are killed, it is completely unmoving. The director fails to make us care about these people.

It would have been a far better story if it continued to concentrate on the heroism of the ordinary Russian soldiers, or the suffering of the cut-off German army (which is never mentioned in the film). If you want to really find out about the Eastern Front my advice is track down the German made film ‘Stalingrad' (made by the ‘Das Boot' team) which although lower budget is a far better portrayal. Even ‘Iron Cross' starring James Coburn is better!

Ok, so some people might say, 'gee but it's only a movie, stop bitching about the history and enjoy it'. What they don't appreciate is the massive potential for the media, and films in particular, to change the public perception of history. Just look at how Shakespeare has changed the public perception of King Richard III. Everybody accepts it as common knowledge that he was a hunch backed evil tyrant because Shakespeare says he was, for the sake of creating a great evil character in his drama. In fact Richard was a good looking and generous King. This is just one example from history. It is irresponsible to dress up fiction about history as truth, because people will believe it.

It worries me that future generations will get a distorted view of WWII because of movies like this changing the facts. OK, so that might not worry you American viewers much, as you say it is your movie. But it does worry us when our county went through so much destruction and suffering in order to keep up the fight for freedom, on our own. My family lost members and friends who were serving in the Royal Navy and Merchant Navies trying to keep Britain alive in the fight against the nazis. We beat the German U-boats, we decoded enigma, and we saved our own country from starvation. It is deeply offensive to those who died to say otherwise. How would Americans feel if we made a movie which claimed that the British army liberated France alone? It would be deeply offensive to your dead who made such a big sacrifice to save Europe from the nazis.

Apart from all this there are dozens of technical errors in the film, which would be pedantic to go on about, but these ruin the film for anyone even vaguely educated. German destroyers never went into the North Atlantic, they got blown out of the water as soon as they left the Baltic sea. A single engined German reconnaissance plane in the Atlantic? Duh! Don't think so. Yet they were supposed to be outside ALLIED air cover!! A British destroyer half sinking a German sub then leaving it alone on the surface?? American submarine sailors fighting as sea borne commandos?? A German sub sailing around on the surface near British waters? They would have been blown out of the water by the Allies, never mind any Germans!! Only a complete dim-wit could watch any of this without laughing.

Apart from all this the film is actually quite exciting! If you go and watch it taking it is a fantasy then you might enjoy it. The sad thing is kids will go away believing what they have been fed is fact.

I remember seeing this film when was I was a small schoolboy in England when it was first on the TV in 1985. Although I only saw snatches of the film, it's images and horror have remained with me to this day. This has to be the most visually shocking and emotionally impacting film that I have ever seen. It terrified the life out of me when I was a kid and I became convinced that this was actually going to happen at any time, I thought this was reality, not a film! For years I used to jump under the bed at the sound of an airplane! The most shocking thing was seeing the things you are so familiar with falling apart and seeing the threads of the order of society fall apart so easily. Some of the images were so strange, one that sticks in my mind is seeing a traffic-warden with a machine gun shooting starving survivors. To a small boy the thought that traffic wardens were going to become machine gun toting monsters was more scary than all the horror movies in the world! The image of a giant mushroom cloud rising over Sheffield and the woman who dropped her ice cream into a rapidly forming puddle of her own urine as a result. The horrible birth scene at the end. Diseased survivors fighting for dead sheep. How nice that the politicians would be nicely tucked up in their bunkers whilst we poor pawns would be left up here to face all that.

I breathed quite a large sigh of relief when the Soviet Union collapsed! Let's just hope that humans have finally realised the power of their own destructive force and we will never have to face this becoming a reality. It's fifteen years since I saw the film and have never been able to track it down or find out much about it, most people I speak to have never heard of it, for a while I thought I must have imagined that it ever existed. I was quite relieved to find other people who had seen it on this web site! It is such a shame that it is such an unknown film, it has got to be one of the most powerful anti-war films ever made, and all on a cheap BBC budget, take that Hollywood! I just wish I could see it again to see if it is as shocking as I remember, and judging by the other user comments here, it is.