I saw this film as part of the Ghent filmfestival 2011. The announcement reminded me vaguely of All Your Dead Ones (Carlos Moreno, 2011), where local politicians take advantage of a mysterious phenomenon in their village, and use it for their own purposes. In other words, satire is intentional. This seems the case in this film too. Several dignitaries make their appearance, being their pompous selves. Bystanders like us cannot take them too seriously. We can only wait for their house of cards to collapse in the end. Contrary to aforementioned All Your Dead Ones, the basic idea is not exploited fully here, rather the opposite. I can imagine, however, that the underlying book did a better job (assuming here).
All in all, the 110 minutes that this film takes, are not well spent. The idea is nice, but it deserves a much better script. In spite of all the effort put in landscapes, props and mass scenes, there is not enough interesting material to keep our attention span all the time. And as far as casting and acting is concerned, satire fails here big time with a majority of personages that are not believable, due to over-acting or being too one-dimensional. The only thing I could do when leaving the theater was scoring a 1 (lowest) for the audience award. Needless to say that I was disappointed and had expected something different from the given ingredients.
All in all, the 110 minutes that this film takes, are not well spent. The idea is nice, but it deserves a much better script. In spite of all the effort put in landscapes, props and mass scenes, there is not enough interesting material to keep our attention span all the time. And as far as casting and acting is concerned, satire fails here big time with a majority of personages that are not believable, due to over-acting or being too one-dimensional. The only thing I could do when leaving the theater was scoring a 1 (lowest) for the audience award. Needless to say that I was disappointed and had expected something different from the given ingredients.