The Blockhouse

In some cases, it seems that a film simply cannot disappoint when an interesting theme is combined with good reviews on FilmBooster, but unfortunately this time the opposite was true. I was very disappointed with this, as this is the biggest difference between my expectations and the final impression in the last year. It is not so much that the film is intimate and has a distinctly television-like appearance, I had assumed that and it was evident from the information about the movie. I was rather unpleasantly surprised by the way Clive Rees dealt with the theme. If you trap a group of people and leave them in isolation for days, weeks, and months, it can be expected that if nothing else, out of sheer boredom, they will talk and reveal things about themselves that they didn't even tell their own spouse, parents, or best friends. However, unbelievably, at the end of the film, you know almost nothing about the characters except their names, just like at the beginning. The director and screenwriter did nothing to allow the viewers to identify with the characters, they simply let them suffer, and that message is very banal and predictable, despite the horror of their situation. It needed to acquaint us with the past of those men before the bomb explosion buried them underground. Modern films often use flashbacks entirely unnecessarily, but here they would have been appropriate. It also needed well-written dialogues that would confront the individual characters, convey something about their value systems, and fulfill the drama genre. Last but not least, I have a problem accepting a story that pretends to be a film adaptation of a real event. It is a bit too much to survive for more than 4 years in complete darkness and isolation. Scientists have conducted experiments on a similar topic and after just two days, the test subjects already showed significant psychological problems. Finally, it is necessary to point out the fact that a large part of the film takes place in semi-darkness or in a state close to complete darkness, which the crew took too literally, so the viewer feels like they are listening to a radio station or can pretend to be in the position of a blind person who went to the movie theater. Overall impression: 35%. The second star is only for the interesting cast, as Peter Sellers was usually cast in completely different roles and even though he was very versatile in terms of acting, I don't remember another film like this in his filmography. (03/11/2009)