djitoy

I would warn that my review has spoilers, but I assure there is nothing to spoil, the writers already took care of that. Once again a complete failure to bring an amazing book to the screen. I mean where should I start? Well let's start with elimination of major characters and the creation of new completely unnecessary ones. Why do they always do that? Every time it's "Hey, let's reinvent the wheel". News flash, the books are great just the way they are, that's why we wanted to see it made into a show. No alterations or changes to the storyline or characters were needed. It would have been so great to see them bring the actual story to life, you know the one Anne Rice wrote. Apparently the writers were given a bad synopsis of the story from someone who was vaguely familiar with books and then wrote a new story very loosely based on that. The end result is a story whose only connection to the books is that some of the characters have the same names and it takes place in the same cities. There are very few, if any, other connections to the books. It's so different that if they had called it something else they wouldn't even have been accused of plagiarism. It may actually be a worse adaption than that of "The Wheel of Time", which I did not believe was possible.

I saw this movie in the theater when it came out and was really looking forward to it and was incredibly disappointed. After the movie myself and the two friends I was with admitted to each other that we had all considered leaving at several points during the film, it was that bad. It drags on and on and on for so long that by the end I didn't even care what happened to the robot boy at all. I only gave it 2 stars because of Jude Law, he was the only entertaining part of what was otherwise a long drawn out super boring disjointed mess. I am a fan of both Kubrick and Spielberg but not this film. I thought maybe Spielberg had lost his touch forever after this film until he came out with Munich which did redeem him in my eyes. I didn't necessarily expect a masterpiece, I hoped it would be, but I did expect to at least be good. I can't imagine Kubrick would have been happy with it and Spielberg should really be ashamed.

I'm mainly writing this to counteract all the Pretentious Haters who apparently expect every movie they see to be a masterpiece. If you think this is a terrible movie than obviously you have never actually seen one, they get much much worse. That being said this is an enjoyable movie and is definitely not evidence of Otto Preminger "Falling Off". Yes if you are hoping to see a movie on par with Munich or Day of the Jackal you may be disappointed but that's not what this movie was going for so just sit back, relax and enjoy a classic 70's film. Anytime you have too many preconceptions of what a film should be, you are setting yourself up for disappointment. I will admit that I am a bit biased towards 70's movies in general, it is in my opinion the greatest era of film stocked with hidden gems.