Abigail e a Cidade Proibida

The horrid dubbing and voice actors ruined it for me, I would have rather read subtitles. I have watch all kinds of films and I really can't figure out who this was written for. The story was all over the place. Maybe it was just a workshop for the film/editing crew? Awesome visuals, so kudos to them!

"Abigail" is a Russian fantasy-adventure film with a good story and magnificent special effects. The director Aleksandr Boguslavskiy is absolutelly unknown for Western audiences and uses the surrealistic style of French directors Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet on "La cité des enfants perdus" (1995), a.k.a. "The City of Lost Children". The huge buildings are typical in Eastern Europe and the city recalls a guetto in World War II. The authorities look like nazi officers and the epidemic that closes the borders of the city recalls most of the societies with the COVID-19 pandemic in the present days. The magic is a twist in the storyline and the flying machine is original. In the end, "Abigail" is neither a masterpiece nor what the IMDb reviews describe, but an entertaining movie for fans of the genre. My vote is six.

Title (Brazil): "Abigail e a Cidade Proibida" ("Abigail and the Forbidden City")

The story telling is falling into pieces and all the points are hardly connected. Story progress are so confusing and so hard to catch up. I personally thinks that there is something wrong with the storyboard that makes the movie losing their main focus in almost every scene. Character dialogues are so clear without sufficient environment noise, makes them sound like a voice-over. The created music are good but the volume are so constant throughout the movie. However, kudos to the VFX team who tries their best to work on the film. The effects are actually quite good, but it cannot save this movie with other elements fall so behind.

Ok, let's start with the good points...

1. Eddie Marsen - best actor in this film by a country mile 2. Visuals and cinematography are good.

Now the bad...

1. The dialogue is absolutely awful - no sentence of more than about 5 words and each line is spoken/shouted with really strange intonations. Seems to be dubbed and/or spoken by actors who just don't know what they are saying in English. 2. The script - a lot of the time it just does make any sense e.g. someone saying they don;t understand something when they were told it 5 minutes previously! Did anyone listen to this before it was released!! 3. All the acting (apart from Eddie Marsen of course) was wooden: no character or personality - they just barked each line of the script at each other in pseudo English (usually in a petulant manner for no obvious reason). 4. The story - apart from the start and end it simply lacked a clear direction for the most part.

In short, Eddie Marsen's great, visuals are good but if you speak English then this will be a painful experience.

The plot itself lacked ingenuity ,, the script looked all over the place ,, really hard to follow at some scenes and the story just disconnected .. add to that I watched it with some weird voice-over ,, so even they were speaking english their lips movement looked like they were speaking russian or something... so that piled up on my misery.

The acting was another disaster !! I mean goodness me !! with all the money spent on the visual effects (which were really good) you'd think they would spare a few grands for at least a B list actors !! ... The only actor I knew was Eddie Marsan who was there for like 10 minutes ,,and that says A LOT ...

I think this was a nice try by the young russian lad, Aleksandr Boguslavskiy, he had a great opportunity but he totally missed... But I personally believe if the movie was all Russian movie, like script, cast and all it would have looked much better.