How sad is this?

Highly Overrated But Still Good

Watch something else. There are very few redeeming qualities to this film.

Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

OK, so it's not polished Hollywood, but nor was late 1970's Britain for the youth of the time. It will help viewers hugely if they are old enough to appreciate this film in context. This was never intended to be light family viewing, and it makes not even the slightest effort to follow standard movie rules. Instead, this represents the disconnection youth felt from authority, be it the power holding class or big business which just seeks to exploit (ooh, nothing changed there). In this movie, the Punks have taken over the streets and the corporations still pull the strings from their protected mansions. Religious groups are not going to like the raw attention to sex and violence which society does its best to bottle-up and deny exists (funnily enough we have retrograded these days into political correctness).Media and institutions are more sophisticated at managing us these these days, and the youth of today has different issues - but the message of the film is a relevant today (maybe even more so) at it was in 1978.Watch with an open mind !

If you can see ball gowns and bovver boots picking their way over rubble beside the Thames set to a classical music score, you're probably watching a Derek Jarman picture.England's first punk film was mostly shot around Butlers Wharf and Shad Thames in Southwark, south-east London; in the late 1970s a hive of mouldering warehouses and docks - ideal for the director's vision of a run-down capital besieged by murderous punks. (Two decades later, in the same spot, Hugh Grant and Colin Firth would inflict less lasting damage on one another in Bridget Jones's Diary.) A preposterous film in many ways, and particularly memorable for punk icon Jordan's burlesque strut to a reggae-fied 'Rule Britannia' while wearing a Union Flag skirt. The Spice Girls didn't know they were born. (Although, in all fairness, Baby Spice did precede the film by a year.)

Queen Elizabeth asks her court alchemist to show her a vision of England in the future, and the alchemist summons a angle/spirit guide(played by Adam Ant) who transports her to London 400 years into the future where it is a post apacalyptic wasteland. The story then follows a group of nihilistic girl punks who all get lengthy monologues(as does almost every character) on British history, art, sex, love, the music industry, anarchy, God, the end of western civilization etc, and their dealings with a mass media mogul who virtually controls the city, sadistic fascist police, and each other. All of the dialogue between the Queen, her alchemist, and the spirit is all in poetic verse, while all of the future talking is mostly cockney sloganeering which was so pretentious in the first couple of scenes I almost turned it off. However it really picked up after about the first fifteen minutes and you barely notice it. It's not really a film about punk so much as it is a film about the breakdown of civilization, which uses the punk scene as vehicle for the metaphor. It was actually a lot better than I thought it would be, I definitely recommend it for those of you interested in this sort of thing. Recording legend Brian Eno also does the score, and if that doesn't sweeten to pot for your to watch this, nothing will. Jarman has had many successes since, but none this vital, at least not for me.

To be honest i expected to see a punk movie. Something in the lines of the movie SLC Punk but with real punks being punks. I'm a huge siouxsie and the banshees fan and was sad that the only scene she was in is where adam ant is watching the TV, and the band pops up for a couple seconds. The only part i liked was the fact that adam ant was in the movie. And the couple seconds of siouxsie and the banshees in a movie. Maybe I'm the only one that feels this way about the movie. Well i gave it a 4 out of 10, sorry. And what is up with the whole going to the "future" and ending up in just England? They could have gone other parts of the world and see other scenes. But i guess it makes sense because it was a low budget movie. well i do recommend SLC Punk if you haven't yet seen it.