A Major Disappointment

It's a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

Near the North Pole, the submarine U.S.S. Jimmy Carter encounters some mysterious objects in the water. It is, of course, impossible for such objects to be truly unknown, so when he can't get answers, the commanding officer just yells in order to get better results.We don't know exactly what happens, but it can be concluded that it was something terrible. The next thing we see is two scientists--Chomsky and Dr. Anne Fletcher--arguing at a United Nations auditorium over whether there is global warming.The Hubris, an underwater station, is attacked as well, possibly by the same unknown objects. One crew member pulls a gun in an effort to stop an unwise retaliation whose results are unpredictable. And then whatever happened to the Jimmy Carter happens to them, supposedly. Chomsky, Fletcher and Fletcher's ex, Capt. Andy Raines, are on the team sent to investigate.The airplane landing at the North Pole is kind of rough (they tell us it's the North Pole, but there's no land there in reality, and yet there is a runway with lights somewhere).The group boards the Hubris and finds everyone dead, but amazingly, once they get the power back, everything works perfectly. Now they just have to find the cause of what happened. Meanwhile, the United Nations sees only one way to solve the problem: a full-blown nuclear attack. This includes the Jimmy Carter (what, there were two? Oh, maybe they fixed it).The rest of the movie consists of arguments over how best to handle what Dr. Fletcher determines are electric eels from another planet who regard Earth as theirs and humans as "intruders". Communication with the outside world is disrupted and must be repaired, but it doesn't really matter because the United Nations won't listen to reason. There are some pretty exciting battle scenes and suspense as we wonder if the crew can somehow stop the United Nations.This movie is pretty much what you'd expect, but some of it is actually better. I thought Capt. Raines and Dr. Fletcher had a couple of pretty good scenes, and Capt. Raines has a nice smile. Their subordinates provide comedy relief, and Chomsky is just a stubborn grouch.The alien creatures look good, for Saturday morning. But this is live-action and you would hope they'd be realistic.There is, of course, an important moral here. Aliens may not be as evil as you think, but you just have to know how to deal with them. Most people aren't that patient or knowledgeable. Not something we haven't seen before, though.It's not too bad if you need something lightweight.

This movie surprised me, after coming close to forward speeding it by 8 times after 45 minutes of lousy acting, ill conceived SF premise and virtual GI-Joe intellectual and philosophic discussion; it gradually and weirdly takes on a life of its own and ends as half a very interesting and credit worthy SF adventure and exploration. The female lead for a while stops just looking like Katherine Hepburn but starts acting like her as well, and though it isn't much and the animation is borderline shlock-horror comic the whole cooked up alien contact eco-catasrophe, deep sea adventure mish mash works a bit in the end. Surprisingly enjoyable!

I don't get this. The movie obviously has a pretty good budget. It has very good cinematography. It has nice pacing, good editing and pretty good directing too. Then WHY OH WHY didn't they hire someone to do a final rewrite of the script so it would not be so damn cheesy and WHY OH WHY did they hire such lousy actors that can't act their way out of a paper bag? This movie could have been good. At most times it LOOKS good and FEELS good but in the end, you realize that the movie was no good at all.So I would say it's a good production but a bad movie. Too bad actually.And eels? Come one, really!

It's not the best movie ever made, but it is far from bad. The effect are a bit outdated for a movie made in 2002, but it is still exciting and a nice little piece to watch on a weekday when you don't have any other films to watch.If you don't mind some lame computer animated scenes, it's actully quite exciting.