Flatland: The Movie

As a loyal fan of the book, I must say that, despite what I'm sure were good intentions and top quality talent; this movie is unwatchable in the context of the original novel. They changed the story, the elements, the plot, and the context. They twisted every element out of proportion so completely it might as well have been called Spiral Land as in out of control.

The novel was deep and meaningful and this film is light and useless. I was hoping for something close to the original with some helpful graphics. There was some value graphically speaking as far as illustrating the dimensions and this would have been very challenging no doubt. But to completely change the story line and turn it into some kind of mediocre fairy tale was a huge mistake in my opinion.

If you are a fan of the novel and are looking here to see if watching this film is worth it, it's not. Don't do it to yourself. You have been warned.

Psssst! - Confidentially speaking (from an adult's perspective) - "Flatland" (a 35-minute, CGI, geometry lesson for the kiddies) was just Hollywood, once again, frantically scrambling to come up with something/anything truly original and interesting to dazzle and entertain, and, then, falling "flat" on its (*bleep*bleep*) face one more time.

Yes. I will admit that, visually, "Flatland" had some "OK" moments - But, for the most part, its story contained way too much mean-mindedness and the whole scenario got pretty tired by repeatedly driving home the point about the existence of the 3rd dimension.

I was really hoping that "Flatland" was going to be one helluva total roller-coaster ride of non-stop animation wizardry, but, instead, it was, pretty much, the same/old, same/old from start to finish.

I loved how Dano and the production team got across very complex scientific concepts with a true, emotion-based Story with a capital "S". This is the kind of stuff we need more of.

I attended a talk at the 2012 Wisconsin Science Festival called "Science and Storytelling" and the presenter showed us a 30-minute film that was just like any other PBS documentary about a scientific concept. Sure, it had a loose narrative on how this discovery led to that breakthrough which led to this experiment, but that's not a STORY.

A story is what Dano Johnson has created with the FLATLAND films. A story has great characters, something at stake, and reversals of expectation.

The world of science doesn't have enough myths to its name -- but FLATLAND and FLATLAND 2: SPHERELAND are perfect contributions to that endeavor. As a storyteller/filmmaker myself, I found the FLATLAND films to be incredibly inspiring.

We watched this in math class and i just couldn't hold it in and yelled in excitement! I highly recommend this to any math teacher for a bit of a fun day! P. S spherius is the best character ever.

In my experience watching this, everyone in my class loved it and almost busted.... out laughing! Spherius made me learn that there is more dimensions than the amount we live in. It made me and my fellow students question the dimensions and ponder about more dimensions than the 3 we mainly know about. The character development of Arthur Square is amazing from not even thinking about the third dimension to being imprisoned by the circles because he tried to say the truth about the third dimension.

In conclusion Flatland is one of the best educational movies out there!

We just finished watching the Ehlinger version; and by finished watching I mean jump to the titles to see who had made this awful adaptation. As someone with a passing knowledge of the original novel, some training in maths, and a solid background in cognitive science, I assure you that there were few (if any) things this movie got right.

Annoying things about the film: the plot is stupid and so slow, the voices and dialogs intolerable, the characters I would not even be able to call flat... There are 'signs' at the beginning which are supposed to be funny, but simply come off as insults, treating the viewer as an imbecile who cannot tell what to pay attention to. So bad. Let's turn to 'math,' then.

It's impossible for a 2D organism with a 1D retina to suddenly 'see' in 3D. He would continue to see the perspective through a plane (e.g. slices of his conspecifics, seen from above in a single plane crossing the flatland, NOT a bird eye's view. On the other hand, it is false for a 2D object NOT to have an idea of what perspective is (it is still the case that an object will appear bigger when closer in 2D).

Too bad to continue. Better check out the book in the Guttenberg project.