Reviews

If there is one movie I come back to again and again to watch, this is it ! Suprisingly I thought the effects were very variable, lots of blue screen models, with the occasional touch of magic, however the real class of this film is in the actors and the script !

Ripley - They cut the power Hudson - How can they cut the power man, their animals !

In those single two lines, the aliens scare factor goes up 100%, no flashy special efects, no blazing guns, just the cold realisation that maybe we are not dealing with animals, that just maybe there is an intellegence behind the frightful visage.

God, just talking about it, makes me want to see it again *lol*

Regards

Steve

Many people have pointed to Matthew Broderick as a problem in the entire film, but have the following points been considered ?

1) The whole idea was to show that young men did achieve officer status during the war, and was more related to their social background then their actual experiance under fire.

2) That Broderick's entire role is underplayed to allow the intelligence of the men serving under him to become the real point of the movie.

3) That in the last third of the movie, Broderick starts to act as an emotional soundboard for the fears and emotions of his unit, resulting in some of the finest acting I have ever seen. Remember the shore scene, where all Broderick has is a sea and sky backdrop to register all the fear and lost hope for himself and his men as they march towards an encounter that they will not return from. If you don't remember it it, set the video to rewind, and go look again, this was a great actor at work !

Steve

Very rarely, you see a film that means one thing when your father is alive, and another when he is dead. When I first saw this movie, my father was still alive, we had not spoken for 8 years, and I thought, cute, but it knows nothing about real life ! When I saw it again, he had been dead for over a year, and I cried like a baby.

I'm English, so for me the baseball element was lost, but what did hit home was the awareness that we are all flawed people, and the expectations we have for our parents, are way and beyond what we achieve ourselves as we grow older.

The film is not about baseball, it is about a second chance ! An opportunity to say hiya Dad, I was didn't know then, but I'm older now and understand more about the way the world works.

In terms of the film, Cosner has never had a better role, Lancaster as Doc Graham finally showed what a great actor he really was, and James Earl Jones was simply perfect.

In short a great film, James Horner's theme music is wonderful, the visuals are fantastic, the acting is as good as you could hope to see.

For most this is a feel good movie, for me this is a reminder that it is never too late to make amends, I just miss my Father