I had... great expectations. The poem made a profound impression on me as a young boy when I read it the first time at around 12 or 13 years of age. The vision of the ship with its hapless passengers drifting endlessly across the infinite void, unable to change their ultimate destiny, descending into inevitable darkness struck a chord that still reverberates within me decades later.
Unfortunately the directors lost the ball. Instead of a much anticipated visual retelling of the epic poem we get bad acting and strange decisions on the cutting board. It seems to me the problem with the actors is that they seem to have been recruited more or less directly from the theatre, obviously a forum they are more comfortable with. The dialog is presented in a strange intonation making it stilted and unnatural. It feels false, recited rather than truly experienced. Neither are the characters given much room to become people in the eyes of the audience. Mostly they lack depth and feel more like paper cutouts, hastily put in place and given a token smear of storyline just enough to separate them from the others, rather than as real living people. Transitions between scenes ar... BLAM STOP BLACK SCREEN almost in the middle of a sentence and then a written text proclaiming the next chapter. So strange. So unnatural. So disruptive.
Yes, the movie had a limited budget which explains some of the shortcuts that had to be taken, but... 20 million actually is quite substantial sum as the story doesn't need much in the way of special effects or expensive sets, not really. The focus on the poem is not on the surroundings or the interior of the ship, but on the interactions between the people on board. No, lesbochock nudity and explicit orgies does not cover the vast rifts in the storytelling, though predicibly the attempt was made. The end result isn't bad, not really. It's worse, it's meh. Meh meh meh.
No, I am not a script writer, nor a director, in fact I have no experience with film making but... this could have been done better. So much better. So disappointed.
