As Good As It Gets

Wow! What a bizarre film! Unfortunately the few funny moments there were were quite overshadowed by it's completely weird and random vibe throughout.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

The acting in this movie is really good.

The best thing about this film is trying to remember what else you've seen the actors in. Pitch Perfect. Master and Commander. Best of all, the King of France in the fantastic Versailles series. As for the plot and much of the acting. Shocking. Self indulgent. Up its own backside. In the third 'iteration' of the purposes of the students thought experiment - to survive s nuclear war and repopulate the planet - the whimpering, whining, very annoying heroine, choose all the artistic types to be in her bunker. Sure they have a fun year, playing cards and singing, but when they get out, completely lacking in practical skills, they die. And the human race dies with them. Doh! If the point of the writer is to show that emotion and feeling are 'better' than rationale, then a) that may be true in certain situations b) it's not true when you let all the useful people die and you are are left trying to survive, with a poet, opera singer, harpist and ice cream maker. What a waste of time. How did this idiot writer and director get funding?

I hardly ever write reviews unless a movie is incredible or pure trash. This movie is pure trash. I am still in disbelief at how bad this movie is.1. The lead actress in the movie is so bad. Its so bad that all of her lines are almost straight monotone. 2. Their "logic" is anything but logical. It would be like having a thought experiment and in the middle someone say "i went into this room and there was a time machine and everyone lived happily ever after"...Its like there was no rules. You could make up whatever you would like. I was going to keep going with this but i just realized i have wasted too much time on this movie. I recommend skipping this horrible waste of time.

I thought it was a great film. Sure, I didn't like the female lead because of her horrible acting but I personally didn't think it took away from the movie much. As others have said, the ideas are good and I think they executed it very well. Definitely worth a watch. I felt like it went by in a flash, I enjoyed it so much. But just a side note, I was originally interested in some philosophy before so you may not see it the same as I did. It's a bit different from the average movie, as in I feel it's best to watch while imagining yourself as one of the students and making your own judgments on the choices made throughout. It's quite thought provoking and a nice movie to watch if you want to relax (not much action) and, although it sounds contradictory to my comment about pretending to be a student, it's a movie where you can just take a backseat approach.

I think most of the other reviews sum this film up quite well. This review is more about me exasperating about a film that had so much potential but failed to deliver.Take a philosophy class and take the end of the world scenario as set out in the film... now explore the choices made according to different philosophical ideals about morality and you have a great film.Instead this film works on the pretense of logic based on skill set and eventually sets that against hedonism. To have a philosophy teacher supposedly some sort of genius that people from around the world send their brightest children to Jakarta to learn from him but falls down at his own logic and premise of selection and then fails to recognize hedonism explains how one reviewer can be left angry at the film.The film also has some glaring plot holes in it...SPOILER ALERT Why would they choose an electrical engineer in a post apocalyptic world without easy access to electricity AND why wouldn't they attempt to hack the control panel? But then, as I am sure anyone watching the film would scream at the screen, logic dictates that if your goal is to repopulate the earth then surely any choice would require 8 females and 2 males with the greatest possible ethnic diversity offering the greatest gene pool potential... and skill set would only factor as a secondary choice.But... we would still be left with a film that failed to explore morality from different philosophical view points which the film initially appeared to set out to explore with the train scenario. Ultimately that is what we as viewers were led to believe that this film supposedly set out to explore... what are the moral principles of choosing one life over another.What this film actually does is provide an argument that the Arts are just as important as the hard sciences... and that while the hard sciences provide us with the tools to survive, the Arts provide us with the skills for civilization. Without the Arts life is mundane... however, the final exercise scenario provides us with the only other real philosophical position in the film to challenge a logic based on skills... a hedonist view point where it is better to destroy oneself in excess of pleasure than to survive because that is what allows us to live and that is what defines civilization.It is easy to over-think this film... I could quite easily make the argument that the film represents a picture of the current modern world whereby we live in a hedonist society built on desire and greed that define what it means to be civilized in the Western world and that the excess of civilization is in itself leading to the world's own destruction. This comes from the final hedonist selection of candidates, its final scenario, and the placement of the film in Jakarta but with Western English speaking actors demonstrates that perceptions of civilization stem from Western values. The final scenario set on a deserted island far removed from Western society survives the mutual self-destruction of a nuclear war. However, I somehow don't think the makers of this film had that in mind and any such analysis would be a classic case of reader response theory whereby the viewer is owning the meaning of the film (in this case) far removed from the author's intent. I do like another reviewer's suggestion concerning the teacher and Plato's cave and I can see where that idea stems from but I have to question whether or not that is merely a case of over-thinking too. After-all the reference to Plato's cave comes in the latter half of the film and it is not made clear at the start of the film that this is what is being set out to explore. It could also be a case of the writers and/or director taking the film in a different direction after exhausting the nuclear war scenarios. The final ending to the film itself certainly gives that impression. Ultimately, I have given the film 5 stars because it does allow such discussion to come from the film... I don't, however, think the film is particularly well executed and should a film really score highly if the only things taken from the film are those that we as viewers bring to it ourselves? There is an argument for that to be the case... after all that is what Alice in Wonderland is ultimately an exercise in and any film or book that is a metaphor of reality.