Dark Island (2010)

Very disappointing...

It is a performances centric movie

The acting in this movie is really good.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

The positive traits of this movie are largely technical. The sound is clear. The lighting is actually sort of pleasing, since they don't rely on shadow for tension. And the picture is entirely focused well. The pacing is perfectly fine. Despite the weaknesses of the movie, I rarely felt too distracted, and the story moved right along.But those things said, this movie feels sort of like a restrained Uwe Boll movie. The plot is pretty straightforward, but there are reversals on reversals as the story moves further.The enemy the team is facing seems to be the same black cloud that appeared in The House on Haunted Hill. But this time, they can fight it with fire extinguisher guns!The plot doesn't bother me too much though, it just felt like an adaptation of a video game.But what does play badly in this movie is that the cast is inadequate for the silliness of the script. By this I mean, the cast is probably just fine. But the script has so much comic-book dialogue that it's hard to play those lines and come across genuine. As a result, there are a lot of people who sound like they're acting as hard as they can.

I gave this an 8...not because the movie was scary or action filled or or even funny or had great effects.It was boring, slow, tiring, nothing exceptional except...a very unforeseen twist.Plot for the most part was on the slim side and well scares were pretty much non-existent.However, there was one thing that saved this from making me feel like I wasted more time than I should have and that was the very end.Maybe the writer just wanted to drag out something so tedious and mind numbing, or maybe it was done by accident...who knows...However the secret ending is what made me write this review by giving it credit.Usually an entire movie is wrapped up with some decent story telling to make me give it a high mark.This will probably bore most people - until the very last moments...which makes the long haul all worth it.

This movie surprised me. I thought I was in for a bore-fest, but it actually turned out to be quite nice.The story was not without flaws, but it was good enough to keep me interested, and had a fairly good, steady flow to it. There were times when the movie was halting though.The effects in "Dark Island" were also quite nice. Especially the CGIs for the animated black cloud. It looked really good, and moved in a very believable way. The make-up effects were good as well.As for the cast, well I was not familiar with any of the ones in the movie, but most of them did a good job, despite often having halting dialogue to work with.There weren't any scary moments or thrills throughout the movie, which kind of dragged the overall experience down a notch.

Lost has become one of the leading patterns for movie writers. Thinking like that and not following it through with great acting is like eating a bitter Ice cream. The movie has nice animations, fighting scenes, a bit cheap on the props because I clearly saw add/remove icon on the laptop. Better fix that next time. Acting is degraded. They not only lack acting skills, but the talent is totally non existent. The cast look like they've been rallied in some nearby coffee shop along side with their cheap looking laptops. Screenplay occasionally drops (like you know what) bits and pieces of characters lives. It doesn't explain a thing. It only shows how little you need to make a film today. You don't have to poses skills other than being someones nephew, or having a 3rd day black belt, to be in the cast. Just don't expect people to love your work!