Reviews

This movie is bad, very bad. It never chooses between action, comedy, horror, war movie. It doesn't adhere to one genre, it tries to be everything and fails to be anything.

Characters are shallow, predictable, stereotypic.

The pace of the movIe is neither slow nor fast: there is no pace. Even the way music is used leads nowhere, one wonders if the goal of the music is to hide how a failure this movie is.

The abondance of gratuitous deaths, be it accidental or wanton murders, just conveys the idea that almost all the characters are either silly or sadistic.

The rare scenes that could have been epic don't save the whole movie, because all in all it doesn't work.

On a positive note, this movie doesn't last long.

As the french famous actor Jean Gabin once said, there are three important things in a movie: the story, the story, and the story.

The story in this movie is excellent.

Sure, there are a lot of technical problems in this movie, one cannot hide it. But the fact that the director is also the writer and the lead role makes this film a personal artistic object, with its own personality. The movie is coherent and well focused, all along with good choices in some very specific topics or details like music, basketball matches rendition and cheerleaders scenes. Paul Préjean is also such a marvellous actor.

8/10.

A movie that begins with someone telling you the backstory for five full minutes is not a good movie. It's like having someone reading a book instead of shooting a movie. Sure, some pictures are supposed to illustrate it, but still it failed here.

The psychology of characters is shallow.

The pace of the movie is not working.

The special effects are too much, nothing feels real.

An incoherent plot, where some details are just wrong. For example, people talk a lot about blogs but never about social networks, while the action is supposed to be taking place circa 2017 or 2018. They discover that some people read books on smartphones, while they are supposed to work in the field of book editing. Nothing makes sense, it looks like the script is a melting pot of heterogeneous stuff but nobody cared to check if the whole was credible in any way.

Furthermore the pacing is slow, the movie is boring, there is no point in following the characters. Sure, the actors are good, but the scenario is shallow.

I strongly appreciated this biopic about Céline Dion the singer. Maybe it's because I don't like her music or her personality, so that I wasn't expecting much from this movie when I started to view it.

The fact that the actors do not look like the real persons is a very good point: whenever a film tries to mimic known figures, the viewer is distracted by any little detail that doesn't match. Here, we don't have to track these unimportant visual details, so we're much involved in the story itself and the psychology of the characters. Also, the songs are not the original versions from Céline Dion, everything has been redone with talent, it's brilliant.

There's a chance a part of the story was romanticised and some mistakes and omissions were done, but I don't care about that. A biopic is not supposed to tell every aspect of every moment in the life of an historical figure. At the end of the movie there is a text that boldly explains that this story is about Céline Dion and that she didn't participate in any way in its production. I find this to be a courageous attitude from the producers, given the number of movies about real people who try to disguise it with the usual warning "any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental" because they just don't want to be sued for public defamation (The Social Network is a famous example).

(Please note that I watched a version dubbed in French for the French public, so that any consideration about erroneous accent was hidden in the version I watched. Also I don't care that the international part of her career was almost eluded, I don't consider Céline Dion to be representative of French culture)

TL;DR This movie is not hand-tailored for the typical Céline Dion fan (and I like that).

This film is not a scientific documentary. This film is an incoherent heap of unproven claims, erroneous reasonings, invented events, ambiguous statements. The foundation of this movie is a stubborn refusal of most scientific achievements, under the pretext that it comes from an established elite and that the elites must be challenged. There is some perfume of conspiracy in this attitude.

All in all, had this film been labeled in the fiction category, there would be no ethical problem. After all, works of fiction (like Da Vinci Code, for example) have their merit as long as the viewer knows it is fiction. But the makers of this movie are actively promoting pseudoscience.

This movie is aimed at people who lack critical thinking, who ignore basic mathematics, who never studied physics, who don't know the scientific process, who never checked how historians get their facts together.

On the contrary, people who have at least a little bit of expertise will quickly find how and why most of the content of the movie is totally invalid. Furthermore, there is an appeal to emotions that is mostly manipulative at key moments in this movie.

This TV series is an unusual blend of documentary and fiction. They don't seem very congruent at first, but gradually it makes sense to have them presented to us this way.

The documentary part is really good, both in its structure and its content. It gives a good idea of what the constraints of an eventual trip to Mars would be. The arguments are systemically backed up by concrete evidence, and sometimes enhanced by interviews of experts.

The fiction part is full of awful technical mistakes, so that it doesn't give a hint of how a real space mission to Mars would really look like. But that's not the real point. The point is to illustrate the main thesis of this TV series: apart from the question of the budget, the most difficult part of going to Mars will not be technical, it will be human cooperation between selected people who have to live in prison-like conditions together for years.

All in all, this TV series mostly is a documentary with a fiction inside, and the fiction is just a clumsy illustration of some of the points of the documentary.

While the whole plot could seem rather weak, this movie is a perfect example of a modern storytelling done with mastery. The pace of the movie is voluntarily slow, the actors are excellent, the breaking of the fourth wall is used with wit by a character who at first seems to be there only to tell us the story, and there are some surprising events that are typical of an action movie.