Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Visually and audibly beautiful, 27 May 2009
Dante 01 is not the film to watch if you're after block-busting action and twisty plotting; however, if you're after an original, visually and audibly stunning Sci-Fi, you've come to the right place. In the vain of other recent Sci-Fi's, such as Eden Log, Sunshine and Chrysalis, Dante 01 is set in deep-space, and focuses on a group of 8 criminals in a spaceship, being illegally tested on by a small party of egotistical scientists.
Marc Caro, director -in collaboration with Jean-Pierre Jeunet- of Delicatessen and City Of Lost Children, in his first solo feature manages to accommodate more than enough in the way of dizzying special effects and stunningly detailed set-pieces. However, as Dante 01 flies ahead with all its beautifully intriguing images, you begin to loose hope of any defining plotlines.
...Not that this is a bad thing, of course. Furthermore, Dante 01's visual splendour is developed with Caro's unusually colourful lighting techniques and a fantastic make-up effects team- recalling one utterly horrific, superiorly graphic death scene (sizzling skin has never looked so realistic).
The film becomes increasingly more satisfying during the final half hour. Not meaning to spoil things for you, but there's a Sunshine-style twist that occurs, which is sure to exhilarate you and help you agree that Dante 01 is one of the finest and most original Sci-Fi's in ages. One to quietly recommended.
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2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
some nice visuals...., 29 Oct 2008
Only slightly better than eden log. There are some nice visual effects to be seen here but that's all really. In fairness the director does add some information in the "making of" feature as he reveals the film leaves more questions than answers. So we have prisoners in space, experimentations, a mysterious stranger and plenty of metaphors about rebirth and creation. You can work the rest out yourself and whilst the film may look polished, it is generally a let down. Just don't expect many answers and a lot is left to your own interpretation which may not be a bad thing. This film didn't captivate me but having paid for it, i wanted to know how it ends.
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1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Disappointing but still better than most recent sf films, 13 Oct 2008
I was expecting big things of this. After the almost-brilliant Sunshine and the darkly impressive Renaissance, I thought proper sf was due a, erm, renaissance in European cinema. At the risk of sounding pretentious, I'm a big fan of 'intelligent', epic sci-fi (Bladerunner, Alien, Casshern, Dark City). So this, a sci-fi film by Marc Caro, artistic director behind the visual feast that was Delicatessen and the pure cinema of City of Lost Children, seemed worth getting excited about. It pains me to say, it left me cold. Allegories and symbolism aside, the plot and story are just too thin - even with a running time of under 80 minutes. The characters aren't 'mysterious', as some more charitable people might suggest, so much as lacking in substance and not given enough material to develop as the story (such as it is) unfolds. The mystery - the question of whether the central character is a saintly victim come to offer salvation to the inmates (and the sadistic jailors-cum-scientists) or simply a psychopath endowed with magical healing powers - becomes lost in a series in a brutal and bloody stabbings or watery vomit scenes.
To see Caro's enormous talent squandered like this is heart-breaking. The dark beauty of his cinematography - the unreal colours and sepia tones, the stark, forbidding landscapes and skylines of Earth, - they're what made Delicatessen and City of Lost Children so visually jaw-dropping. But use those techniques in a gloomy spaceship setting, as in Alien:Resurrection, and they become cliched and cartoonish.
None of which would make this a bad film, of course, if the story was strong enough to stand out, but that's not the case.
This film might appeal to sf/horror fans who like their screens awash with gore and viscera - there are scenes where the bodily fluids are practically spilling out of the frame. There are also a couple of unintentionally comic scenes where the camera is fixed on a frame attached to the actor and pointing at the central character's face as he stumbles around the corridors on the point of collapse; these reminded me of that amusing Radiohead video and, even more so, of the jarring moments towards the end of Danny Boyle's The Beach, where it goes all videogame-like and snaps you out of the story, utterly ruining the tension and the momentum of the film. A brave technique to employ, maybe, but here it looked cheap and wholly out of context.
For those who wanted the pure cinema of Caro's earlier works, or those who want a think-piece set in space, well, this ain't the film for you, I'm afraid.
On the plus side, sf fans, it's not another bloody Star Wars prequel and it probably wouldn't have even got funding in Hollywood, and for that I'll give it 3 stars instead of 2.
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