Great Expectations

Rating:
Summary: Not a good movie
Review: I've never read Dickens, or watched any movies/tv series based on any his novels, so I don't know what is from the book and what is from the movie director. I really enjoy historical dramas, especially BBC tv series. In this Great Expectations, the acting was good, especially the heartless little Estella. However, what I didn't like about the movie:

1. Too much scenery, not enough interaction. Instead of 10 seconds of Pip walking on the moors, we get 30 seconds. The same goes for birds flying, waves on the water, Pip walking through dark tunnels, Pip walking through dark streets, Pip walking up stairs, Pip rowing a boat. Pip opening doors and walking down dark hallways. Lots of extended scenes of scenery and no character conversations. Also, there're lots of scenes of Pip and Miss Haversham, Joe and the convict. But, there's next to no scenes of Pip and the love of his life, the grown-up Estella. Which leads to the next point:

2. As a result of the lack of scenes with Pip and Estella, we hear secondhand that she's unhappy, and we only hear Pip say that he's in love. The editing/screenplay is so choppy that we never hear why or how. I guess we are to assume from 10 minutes of the movie that Pip loves her madly because she is pretty and treats him very cooly.

I mean, honestly, we get what's got to be a total of 30 minutes of boring scenery in the movie, and then almost none of the adult Pip falling in love with Estella, or what happens to Estella after marriage?

3. Discontinuity. I don't understand why Estella is so heartless and cruel as a child, then comes back as a soft mannered, kindly seeming lady. Is this a gentleman-trap of some sort?

I give this 2 stars because the acting was very good, but the storyline is super choppy, cryptic, and unbalanced. It would have been better if more time had been spent on explaining the plot instead of long panoramas of the scenery.

Rating:
Summary: Horatio Hornblower as Pip!
Review: It's an unique adaptation of Charles Dickens' "Great Expectations", but still, it's not as good as John Mills' "Great Expectations" (1947).

In John Mills' "Great Expectations" the events are well-focused, and Miss Havisham is meaner and crueler than in this movie. So it's better to see John Mills' "Great Expectations", or to read the book before seeing this movie.

Two things I did not like in this movie, the "WIDE" logo which appear on the screen every 15 minutes, and the narrator who appears on the beginning of the movie. We want to have fun not a lecture.

Ioan Gruffudd (Horatio Hornblower) performance is excellent as always, he proved that he always conquer, in love and war.

Rating:
Summary: A creative adaptation of a classic
Review: We just got done watching this movie in my literature class because we read the book. I must say that when I started the book I didn`t have a very open mind; the very beginning of the story seems a little trivial and is certainly not the most exciting point of the story. When I`d been through about six chapters I wasn`t enjoying it, though I`d read worse. But we watched the first forty minutes of this movie and I was fascinated by the eerie, dark mood it portrayed. Watching this version definitely helped me to enjoy the book from then on. Dickens really did do an excellent job of setting the mood and the dark atmospere in "Great Expectations", and whoever made this movie knew the right way to show the same mood on film. I think the creators of this movie also knew the book genuinely inside and out, which is what I infer from the phenomenal choice of cast members. The actors chosen to play both the young and older Pip, Abel Magwitch, Miss Havisham, Jaggers, and Wemmick were all simply perfect for the roles. In fact, all the actors were extremely fitting, except the one actress who played Estella - she wasn`t neccesarily the way I`d imagined the grown-up Estella to be like, at least, but she did carry out the part well enough. There is some dialogue and a few scenes at the end that stray a little far from the book, but the ending was the one thing I wasn`t neccesarily satisfied with in the book anyway. I think I even like the ending in this movie better.