prentrup at home

I was going to write that it's a convoluted time travel/virtual reality movie that leans heavily on prolonged action sequences and resembles a video game. Then I found out it was based on a video game! As someone who has never played one I was two drinks behind. The 1492 scenes are dim and chaotic. Adversaries pop out from every corner no matter how many he kills, just like a video game, but he wasn't racking up points. I just wanted him to get out of the damn castle, stop fighting everyone and go find Christopher Columbus. Guess what? He did! Fun times.

The silliest film I've seen for a long time. Two hours of silly. That's two hours of my life. They owe me.

Sorry, but despite good performances, photography, music and production, the plot turns out to be really silly. What is the mission of the giant alien jellyfish? To set a 12 piece puzzle, the answer to which is for dimwit government agencies to share data with their foreign counterparts, in order to learn an alien language that transcends time. But there are already languages in the world that transcend time, and one detects the self-referentiality that afflicts everything these days. The brooding atmosphere and music hint at profundity, but the fate of the world eventually hinges on a mobile phone call to a Chinese general at the point of a gun. Fortunately there's an American lady academic on hand to save the world from the silly foreigners and the silly men, and the call gets through. 'Shall we make a baby?' asks the man hero to the lady hero as the movie closes. Yes, yes, anything, but please draw the curtains.