Portales

This film held a lot of promise, the basic premise of strange, unexplained, alien doors appearing all over the world, leading to much of the population disappearing was an intriguing one and could have delivered so much more. I was hoping for a smart, cerebral sci-fi in the same territory of Solaris, but in the end it all came across as bit incoherent and rambling. The structure, made up of a series of short films, didn't help - although each section was linked by the over-arching theme, they seemed to lack any other connection and with an entirely new cast and narrative turning up every twenty minutes or so, the whole film had no coherence or continuity. There were some strong individual concepts and ideas, but they just weren't given time to develop into anything more than brief vignettes. The cast were decent and did what they could and there were some nice VFXs and production values but the script just wasn't strong enough and the end product didn't match up to the ambition of the filmmakers.