As an Oxonian, this film is really painful to watch. It captured little of Oxford's beauty or intellectual wealth. All it has were a bunch of mediocre actors (save John Hurt) that complement an equally terrible screenplay.
I don't know how truthful it is to the original, but I find the attempted wittiness in the dialogues very unnatural and clumsily pretentious. It didn't help that it had Elijah Wood and other unexciting actors to deliver them in the most monotonous way possible. Burn Gorman (the Russian, if you can tell) was a constant eyesore whose character seems to have served absolutely no purpose in the story. In fact, the so-called sub-plots and the characters in them were all unpleasantly and purposelessly distracting that one is left wondering what the story is trying to take the audience to.
And then of course there's the main plot, which is full of plot holes. Just to mention one, if the series is common enough to be mentioned in a diagram that takes up half a page of a textbook, how convincing is it for Elijah Wood, supposedly a nerdy mathematician, not to figure the pattern out upon seeing the second symbol in the series? I mean, I don't do maths, but hell, I knew the second I saw the 'fish'.
John Hurt was excellent and that's all the good things I can say about this movie. Seriously, if the plot of a murder mystery sucks, you don't expect the movie to go anywhere near greatness. Too bad this film happened to be set in my town and my uni, and let's hope the audience won't think we Oxonians are as dumb.
I don't know how truthful it is to the original, but I find the attempted wittiness in the dialogues very unnatural and clumsily pretentious. It didn't help that it had Elijah Wood and other unexciting actors to deliver them in the most monotonous way possible. Burn Gorman (the Russian, if you can tell) was a constant eyesore whose character seems to have served absolutely no purpose in the story. In fact, the so-called sub-plots and the characters in them were all unpleasantly and purposelessly distracting that one is left wondering what the story is trying to take the audience to.
And then of course there's the main plot, which is full of plot holes. Just to mention one, if the series is common enough to be mentioned in a diagram that takes up half a page of a textbook, how convincing is it for Elijah Wood, supposedly a nerdy mathematician, not to figure the pattern out upon seeing the second symbol in the series? I mean, I don't do maths, but hell, I knew the second I saw the 'fish'.
John Hurt was excellent and that's all the good things I can say about this movie. Seriously, if the plot of a murder mystery sucks, you don't expect the movie to go anywhere near greatness. Too bad this film happened to be set in my town and my uni, and let's hope the audience won't think we Oxonians are as dumb.