Nova Zembla

a good story, great ambitions of director, a shallow movie.and everybody is innocent. because desire to create a blockbuster was so great but details are ignored. to present a page of history is not an easy mission. and it is first sin of this project. a huge mountain and an army of Liliputans. and, for make the business more complicated - usual 3 D which, in this case,a real burden. it is not a bad film but only smoke of expensive cigar.because,wanting to tell all, it fails to provide anything. old clichés, dusty characters,great adventure without any crumb of emotion. so, second sin of movie is to create expectations. the last sin - Doutzen Kroes. beautiful, charming, she is only chain for too heavy pendant.

Nova Zembla doesn't hold up to the promises made. In fact, it fails utterly, which, truly, is a shame. An adventurous story, a beautiful setting and (for Dutch standards) good acting but all that cannot make watching this film bearable.

The storytelling is unbelievably slow. While being promised an action-packed heroic story it instead halts drastically every time a little climax should be due, resulting in the opposite. And if your film is to be made for a Dutch audience based on a classic Dutch history lesson almost every Dutch person will remember, you just can't get away with it. Not even with showing random scenes of Doutzen Kroes' breasts.

The cast was fine though and the acting wasn't particularly bad. The lines didn't seem forced and it all had a genuine feel, which is often lacking in Dutch films. The technical side of this film wasn't bad either and the effects, costumes, locations and props are a rare perfect blend.

It is clear this film lacked the experience of a great captain and should be a learning opportunity for inexperienced director Reinout Oerlemans. Nova Zembla fails to hoist the colours and sail full speed ahead and instead feels more like a rowing boat without oars. A typical trailer-beats-film.

While I think the 3D-effect in today's cinema should enhance the human experience to get a certain feeling of stepping right into the scene, the three dimensional engineers of the Nova Zembla crew are taking the effect way too far. The extreme shallow dept-of-field (DOF) of most of the scenes creates an very unnatural effect. Not like the human eye it would see. 3D in Nova Zembla brings unnecessary unsharpness to wide shots instead of crisp details. It reminds me more of early cartoons and anime/manga than state-of-the-art improvement of the modern cinema experience. A missed chance for Reinout...

On the other hand, the shots from above (like the viewing angle used in the shots where we can see the boat from above) are well filmed. And the 3D-effect while filming from a lower angle through the grass does a great job. But those are just minutes of the whole movie play time.

A terrible movie. The first Dutch 3D movie is a big disaster. It's overrated, the movie is to slow and the storyline to thin. The actors are below average especially Doutzen Kroes. She's not a actress, just a beautiful model. The beginning of the movie is hopeful but after 20 minutes it's over. The 3D effects are not that good. You must use these kind of effects in movie with a spectacular storyline. This movie is to boring and there is not one moment where you can say "wow". I know it's very difficult the tell something about the rich history of Holland but I'm not sure if that is what the director wanted. He just wanted to make the first Dutch 3D movie, that's it. Overall......stay at home and maybe you consider a DVD rent in a couple of months.

The movie starts interesting and one might be hoping for an interesting adventure. But unfortunately it totally breaks down. Nothing is happening anymore, it gets only extremely boring and predictable. All the characters are so blunt and uninteresting. You do not care at all for the characters and approximately in the middle you just start to skip further and further and still, you do not miss anything. I do not want to spoil something here, but the ending is totally predictable and cliche. No character development at all, it is really sad to produce something like that. It should have been totally foreseeable, just by reading the script to understand, that this can only go south (although they are going north actually).