1997: il principio dell'arca di Noè

This is truly the worst film I have ever watched.

I liked the cover, so i took it from the video rental shop. Big mistake. Everyone this evening was blaming me for wasting 2h of their life.

The real hard thing is... i watched this movie, and I just didn't understood the story. It was confusing and had no red line. At the end of the film I didn't knew the film was about... the only thing i knew was, there was a space station.

Roland Emmerich did nice Jobs with "Independence Day" or "Godzilla"... but this one was really awful. Calling this film "the German 'Star Wars'" is offending everything German.

Think that the bad rating is because some Americans feel addressed. And not the bad Russian or Chinese ..., a well-made film for its bugged and time, of course you can't question everything, but the story isn't that far off in 2021.

Studying in Berlin in 1984, I attended a packed first screening of this film, billed as "Der Deutsche Star Wars." I was astonished at how childishly executed the film was. It seemed to have a single special effect, space station scaffolding rumbling past camera(sound in space?), re-used 7 times. I counted. The plot was equally thin. CIA world domination, love story, bad marriage, predictable lines. pacing excruciatingly slow. The audience that day was equally unimpressed, so it wasn't just me.

Happily, the director went on to make real eye candy with decent budgets.

Fascinating and also inconceivable somehow, that THIS really was a breakthrough for Emmerich's career. Okay, the whole career is fascinating measured at the movies he makes - but this one ... Wow! I totally agree with "malk4": Nearly the only thing memorable (and kinda understandable) and worth mentioning is: "There was a space station"!

The year is 1997, and World Peace seems to have come, with most classic weapons of mass destruction having been abandoned. However, orbiting the Earth there is the European/American space station FLORIDA ARKLAB, capable of controlling the weather at any location on the planet underneath. A civil project by nature, it might be abused as an offensive weapon, since it could deliver devastation to any potential adversary simply by creating natural disasters such as storms and floods. No wonder the space station soon becomes the central point in rising political tensions between East and West, next stop World War 3 (as indicated by the German tagline (transl.) "The end of our future has already begun"). We're following the main protagonist Billy Hayes, an astronaut aboard the station, as he wades through a plot of secrecy and sabotage trying to tell friend from foe in the process.

This film is the first "real" movie by Roland Emmerich, and knowing his later works, it is, simply speaking, surprisingly good. First off, it was and is a visual treat by any standard, with well-crafted models and a set-design that made a point in trying to look as realistic as possible. At that, it is visually reminiscent of many other movies from that era (Star Wars or Moonraker, to name some), but doesn't fail nearly as badly as some of them do; it simply looks good. And what's more, this movie has a story that makes some sense and won't let you leave your seat until it is resolved. The acting is good, the characters are well drawn and partly are in for some surprise. The general mood is by no means optimistic, this is definitely a Cold War scenario, which nowadays of course has the tendency to make you chuckle, considering that 1997 looked totally different than portrayed in the movie.

Bottom line: if you know later Emmerich blockbusters such as ID4 and Godzilla, you definitely notice his handwriting in this one, and seeing the path he took from here on makes sense. But much unlike said later works, this movie excells not only in the audio and CGI department, but also has something like characters and storyline. People liked ID4 as a cineastic lollipop, but as a film, this one is far better than most