yakikorosu

For all the constant haunting violins, beautiful sunsets and striking landscapes shown in this film, it somehow completely misses the point of the story it adapts. I could accept a "loose" adaptation of MacBeth that skips about half of the play, modifies the order of scenes, combines other scenes together, gives lines said by one character to another character, and invents some plot points outright, if this retained the core of MacBeth, but this does not at all. Instead, Michael Fassbender mumbles and whisper-talks his way through a dull, practically wooden performance that strips MacBeth of what makes him an interesting character: his internal struggle where morality and reason fight against opportunism and ambition. The film is made like the director thinks MacBeth is nothing but a play about a violent guy and the various people who kills. I daresay if that's all MacBeth were, we wouldn't still be performing it 400 years after it was written. Instead of Shakespeare's beautiful poetry, the movie is drowned in over-art-directed vistas and just plain bad directoral choices (like setting the entire first 10 minutes of the film as a battle that is shot almost entirely in ludicrous slow motion--the kind of thing a first-year film student who has just seen "300" might think is a good idea).

If you want to see MacBeth presented in a cinematic style rather than as a play, I suggest the far superior 1971 version by Roman Polanski.

I found Time Out to be an insipidly dull and uninteresting mess, with nary an ounce of emotion or insight to be gleaned. The main culprits are the script, which fails to offer any kind of insight into the protagonist's baffling actions, and the direction, which drags out the uninteresting details of his mind-numbing scheme interminably instead of attempting to connect you with any of the characters on an emotional level. When making a film about a "regular" person doing things as ridiculous as these, it is crucial to do these things, and Time Out does neither. Instead, I was stuck for two astonishingly slow hours watching a man the film never tells me anything about engage in a laughably amateurish plot for reasons that make no sense. The "tension" I have read reviews praise this film for generating must have been surgically removed before the film made its way into my DVD player, because last time I checked, tension over a film's events requires at least an iota of engagement with what is occurring on screen, which this film seems utterly uninteresting in eliciting.

First off, I am a huge fan of "think" sci-fi pieces, from Arthur Clarke to Fred Pohl to my personal favorite, Philip K. Dick, and have always thought the genre woefully underrepresented in films. So when I found out about this film and saw the high IMDb score (it was an 8.0 at the time) I eagerly bought it, only to be extremely disappointed.

The biggest culprit here is the acting, which ranges from "B" quality at best to "Z" quality most of the time. It's particularly bad in the first 20 minutes of the film, and the only actor who gets into any kind of groove as it goes on is Tony Todd. The story is also rather uninteresting--Jerome Bixby just took the story to the Star Trek episode "Requiem for Methuselah," which was a mediocre episode to begin with, and remade it at 2x the length. Unless you are thrilled at the idea of hearing lengthy discussions about the geographical layout of the Earth in the cro-magnon period, the first half of the movie is a complete waste.

The film tries to regroup later on with a rather ambitious religious angle, and rides that to a few interesting scenes, but it lacks the insight to really explore the nuances of the subject matter, preferring an attack on religious conventions with the subtlety of a photon torpedo. To top it all off, there's a ridiculous, unnecessary, surprise ending that is worthy of M. Night Shyamalan (in case you're not sure, this is NOT a compliment).

In the end, this is just a really overlong mediocre Twilight Zone episode, except with worse acting than they typically had on that show. Perhaps it has such an inflated rating on this site because 90% of its votes came from non-US users, who maybe saw this film dubbed or with subtitles, masking the poor acting.