The supporting cast for this film is first rate, and so is the leading man, James MacAvoy; however, Anne Hathaway was wrong, wrong, wrong for the part. She’s not smart enough or quick enough to be convincing, and just looked lost for the entire film. A better choice would have been someone like Amanda Root, though perhaps Ms. Root is a little old to play the younger Jane.

I fear Danny Boyle has fallen into the “we’ll fix that in the DVD extras” trap in a big, big way. There are two pieces of vital information that are ABSOLUTELY NOT COMMUNICATED in the movie itself and are pretty damned important to establishing any kind of believability or coherence.

1. The film is set only 50 or so years into the future, and
2. The sun is failing not because it’s at the end of its natural life cycle but because a cloud of exotic matter has drifted into its core and is interfering with its fusion cycle.

The only way to learn of these two premises, however, is to watch the DVD and listen to either of the commentary tracks!!! BOOO!

Without these two facts up front, the premise of the film is slightly ridiculous. The sun will reach the end of its natural life cycle in something like 5 billion years by current estimates (including that of Bryan Cox, the astrophysicist from CERN who consulted on the film). But of course the characters, technology, etc. depicted in this film are more or less identical to our 21st century levels of development. Hard to swallow.

That aside, however, yes, this is a gorgeous piece of filmmaking, total eye candy in almost every shot. It’s also a very ambitious film; Dr. Cox claims and I think I have to agree that no film has ever really been made about the sun. The film also makes a good stab at tackling what it would be like on a personal/philosophical level to confront the sun in this fashion, from close up, from the point of view of preparing to tinker with it to save the solar system. Doyle and writer Alex Garland did not shy away from confronting this stuff, though I couldn’t quite buy the notion that seven years’ exposure to it would turn a person into a fundamentalist hater who wants to send us all to heaven.

So it’s worth taking in for the imagery and some of the ideas, but it’s narratively deeply flawed.

If you’re the kind of person who can enjoy fantastic music despite stupid lyrics like “behold, upon my bending spear/a monster’s head stands bleeding” then this is definitely for you. VERY good music, and hey, Kirsten Flagstaad is always worth hearing!!!!

I would especially recommend this to anyone who watched HOAX and wanted to see more about Clifford Irving—not just the facts on what he did, but a brilliant cinematic meditation on what made him do it and on what drove other fakers like El Myr (about whom Irving wrote a book) and Orson “War of the Worlds” Welles himself. Plus it’s just a trip in and of itself!

This movie exactly lives up to its hype, but I expected more. The best part was watching Daniel Day-Lewis pretend to be Klaus Kinski, but we only really needed one Klaus Kinski. It’s a pity he’s gone, but one was enough. The conflict with the preacher boy really didn’t convince me, and the ambiguity created by using the same actor for both Paul and Eli annoyed me, settled as it was by one throwaway line about how Paul was successful in another part of California. Production values, set design, etc. were good, performances were fine, but I didn’t feel any Upton Sinclair in this, and that, more than anything else, was what I was hoping for.

I’ve always been interested in this kind of material – a childhood obsession with the works of, e.g. Jean Auel demonstrated that, but none of it has ever FREAKED ME THE HELL OUT before. This book not only dramatizes man’s evolution from a little possumlike primate during the age of the dinosaurs but also, in the last fourth or so, speculates on how we could DEVOLVE into, among other things, a feral hairy semi-ape who’s lost the power of speech, a hive of little eyeless social moles AND an enormous “elephantine” primate herded as a food animal by superdeveloped predator mice. I’ve been indulging in a lot of stories of degeneration lately anyway (the superexpanded Apocalypse Now Redux, another round of H.P. Lovecraft, etc.) but nothing else has creeped me out like this. I’ll be remembering this book for a long, long time.