Reviews

Pros: Robert Carlyle was great as the same type of character he always plays. But he's good at it. Jeremy Irons was good. Ed Speleers was ok.

That's it.

Everything else was bad. If you took every movie about a boy+dragon that's ever been made and list everything they all have in common, that's the entire Eragon movie and script, which is so cliche, so predictable, and so empty, it's like it was written by a child.

Rachel Weisz is a good actress but ENTIRELY the wrong voice for Saphira the dragon. She was awful. John Malkovich (Galbatorix) was awful. Djimon Hounsou (Ajihad) was HORRIBLE.

The characters were shallow and had the worst and most cliche names ever. The premise could fit into 1 sentence. The plot bounced from one boring scene to another, with rarely any transition or explanation. I didn't have to look up that this movie came from a book. It *feels* like the creators took a novel and chopped it down to the absolute bare minimum required to throw a title on and never looked back. Whatever book this movie may have come from, I don't care after watching this thing.

There are no redeeming qualities in this movie that make it worth sitting through, even if it's free. Just move on.

First thing: apocalyptic, post-apocalyptic, and dystopian movies are my favorites. Greenland ranks right up there among the best in these genres. It's very well done, intense, terrifying, and easy to relate to .

That being said, Greenland is a mixed bag of good, bad, and weird. Most of the science is pretty good, special effects are terrific, fight scenes are intense and realistic, and it's very easy to get emotionally engaged with the plight of the main and side characters.

Some of the science and physics were a little suspect, to make it more dramatic and entertaining. For instance, the comet's tail in one scene was facing the wrong direction (it should be facing away from the sun, not away from its trajectory), and all of the sounds were unrealistic. In every scene with an impact or explosion, it did not account for the speed of sound, and sounds were heard instantly. Literally every scene got it wrong.

The WORST was the absolute stupidity, self-serving, and oftentimes outright homicidal decision-making by the main characters. I'd have to say these were perhaps the dumbest main characters I've ever seen in an apocalyptic movie. They never seemed to take the individual situations as seriously as they should, and they kept failing to prioritize correctly (seriously, who remembers to bring sandwiches and t-shirts on a life-and-death one-way plane trip but forgets their child's insulin in the car).

In multiple scenes, the Garrities--carrying around extremely sought-after wristbands that is the only ticket to survival--just wear them out in the open and openly discuss that they were "selected" with complete strangers. In one particular scene, the male lead John Garrity, after finding out his wife and child had been kicked off of a plane, just before a security perimeter was breached and 1000s of people rushed the airport, stood perfectly still on a cargo bay door, watching nonchalantly as a bloodthirsty crowd of hundreds of people rushed toward the plane that was trying to take off, single-handedly (and inexplicably) holding up the the plane from taxying and taking off, triggering a series of events that resulted in the gruesome deaths of dozens of people. This was just an example. Throughout the movie, each of the male and female lead made repeated, idiotic decisions that endangered themselves, their child, and innocent people around them.

That is really my biggest complaint about the movie. The lead characters (who are supposed to be the protagonists that we related to and cheer for) were so dumb and got so many people killed, I began wishing for their demise so that people around them would no longer be put in so much danger. Their mindsets and decision-making simply made no sense, and it's apparent from the way the plot played out the writers intentionally made them very ignorant and short-sighted to enhance the drama and limit their chances of survival.

This movie could have been a 10/10 if the main characters were more relatable and not so stupid, but as it was, they almost ruined the movie. 7/10.

The concept and premise of this movie were very creative, but the problem is that's all it had. The entire plot can be summed up as "A tire comes to life in the desert and embarks on an inexplicable killing spree, occasionally distracted by a woman, while spectators look on." That's it.

The filming was actually pretty good and tire motions very well done. But that's it.

The sound effects were over-the-top ridiculous, often overlaying images of the tire rolling across the ground with what sounded like sandpaper on concrete. No reason.

The killings (and there were MANY) seemed to have no purpose most of the time, starting with a scorpion, crow, and a rabbit. Creatures--and then humans--were killed simply because the tire encountered them. Nothing more. In fact, Robert the Tire went out of his way to kill living creatures. No reason.

Ok fine, so Robert's a serial killer. But then we have a woman introduced, whom the tire becomes mildly infatuated with, even though she ignores him, and he barely even spends time around her or sees her. Her presence and his crush on her are shoe-horned into the plot and don't fit naturally. She even does a partial nude scene. Why? No reason.

The spectators. They are just watching the tire from a distance with binoculars, even though the tire rolls for miles throughout the movie. Why? How? No reason.

The dialog. Awful. The dialog was packed with bizarre figures of speech, obsolete clichés, and weird terminology and phrases, as if the script was either originally written in another language and translated literally to English or the writer learned English by watching American TV shows and movies from the 1960s-1980s.

In one particularly strange scene at a gas station in the middle of the desert, with no other structures visible on the horizon, the father of a teenage boy on a bicycle gives him some cash and tells him to go get a pizza, stating that it should give him something to do "for 10 minutes". Just looking around, it's obvious a bike ride for a pizza would be an hours-long endeavor.

At this point in the movie, it's difficult to tell if idiotic quotes like this are intended to be part of the dark humor, or if the writers just put no thought into the context. That's how most of the movie's dialog really comes across, as if the writers weren't really putting any thought into the scenes.

While scenes and lines like that can be humorous at times, the laziness in the writing really stands out and can ruin the fun of a movie like this.

This is not the worst movie ever made and does earn a couple of stars for creativity, but it's certainly not worth recommending to anyone. Watching this movie actually reminded me a lot of the infamous "Goat Simulator" video game. It's stupid, creative, has no point, and is fun for about 15 minutes, but you wouldn't tell your friends about it or play it again in a few days.