Flatland: The Film (2007)

Best movie of this year hands down!

Highly Overrated But Still Good

The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

Flatland won't get any flattery from me.It looked like it was going to address some interesting political matters, but I had to give up after 20 minutes despite my passion for animated films. I have no problems with visual minimalism but,first of all, this piece seriously overuses text insertions, half of which we don't even have time to read entirely. If one is incapable of telling his story through drawings, one should seriously consider using a narrator.Secondly, what I found really, really upsetting was the sound. The acting is uniformly terrible, and some of the voices are painful, plain and simple. Unbearable. I'll never know if a good story was told here, for it was unwatchable due to the poorness of its delivery.On an irrelevant side-note, I couldn't help but think there's a simple mistake in the design: women are lines while men are shapely. I would have imagined the opposite. And I wonder why everyone had to be so straight. As if 2D wouldn't accommodate curves...

This is a great film with a lot of strong philosophy weaved in, I'm not surprised to find that there is a great book behind this film. The central plot for the film is a 2D world and two factions within it. Right from the start of the film you are bombarded with parallels to reality and its hard not to get distracted by your own thought chain, in a good way :) The CGI is as good as it needs to be to tell this story, the yellow sphere that you'll have seen if you've read this far is a bit misleading - the film has its own unique style that extends further than such basic geometry and reflections. The actors voice overs are quite good, the film isn't amateur and there is a lot of narration to help the story along.My main criticism of the film would be an excess of narration - sometimes its useful but other times its downright patronising and by the end you end up sighing every time you see narration.

The premise had me gripped, as did the opening five minutes. But execution is disappointing and I can't help feel that here is a film of potential genius wasted by bad voice talent, bad script editing and a lack of proper characterisation.Flatland, let's be brutally honest, is a film for geeks by geeks. The idea just appeals to nerds and if you're a nerd, chances are you'll love this film. The whole mathematical purity will just hit the right buttons and you'll enjoy telling your friends all about the innovative 'angles' (excuse the pun) and clever 'parallels' with modern philosophy. But truth is, nerds don't write good scripts because they forget that behind every great story idea is a driving engine called character. And in Flatland, it ain't just the graphics that are two dimensional.There are other reasons you can tell there are nerds at the steering levers. The producers just don't know what to do about women. Nerds see. Women are dangerous, incomprehensible, flat lines with no substance. When they get in the way of the plot, the women eat themselves. When the men in the movie display chauvinism its dismissed with a knowing wink and a few lines of humour.Then there's the plot. Politics, oppression and war wrapped up with a Messiah prophecy. It's not exactly ground breaking.Visually the film is interesting. But there's just too many dimensions missing to make this as good as the other reviews suggest.As a cheap, badly voiced, badly directed indy attempt its good for a look-see. But you'll go away wondering if, out there somewhere in a parallel universe, there's another version of you enjoying a much better, more 'rounded' film where women actually have active roles, the characters have personalities instead of plots to further and there's a bit more to the whole thing than just 'oh wow, lets have fun with dimensional space'.A missed opportunity. But possibly worth a look simply because it's so... different.

As a person that is interested in Math and when I heard about Flatland the Film I had to obtain a copy. The first time I watched Flatland the film I found it very interesting with great 3D animation. As I watched a second and third time I began to notice hidden things within the film, which must have been placed within the film on purpose, and I did not notice them the first time I watched. In addition, every time I watch it the question comes to mind… how many things did you guys hide in this film and is it your trademark??? I found the film was very true to the book and have recommended this Film to many and the response has been great. We have planned some viewing parties to see if we can find more hidden things. This film is great keep up the good work. When is your next film coming out and what is will be hidden in it?