Rating: 
Summary: Brilliant all around masterpiece
Review: "Pandaemonium" is truly a tribute to two of the great geniuses of English Literature--Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth. All aspects combine together to create a masterpiece for all lovers of poetry AND Romantic Poets. I teach English 9-12 and a class on the Romantic Poets so I know my stuff and was completely blown away by the beauty and dedication of the movie. It doesn't pull punches with the opium addiction and Coleridge's usually cold marriage to his wife Sarah. Lord Byron makes a cameo. I was slightly disappointed that there was no room for introducing Asra--Mary Wordsworth's sister and Coleridge's obsession--but that side story doesn't detract from the overall experience. I cried at the end because "Kubla Khan" is truly his masterpiece and a beautiful work of literature. I will be showing this movie the first week of school with my Romantic Poet's class. It's a must! I just wish there was something equally brilliant about my true poetic love John Keats!
Rating:
Summary: A Great Movie about Great Poets
Review: "Pandaemonium" just might be one of the greatest movies ever made about poets. There are very few that I've seen that haven't been superficial, over the top or boring. This movie is sublime. The story of Samuuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordworth makes grand entertainment and exciting drama. Linus Roche is a bundle of wild energy as Coleridge, with his addiction to opium (laudanum) taking center stage as a symbol of his ups and downs in his creative energy and mental health. John Hannah is very good as Worthsworh, a poet totally different than Coleridge but bound together at first for the common cause of writing great poetry. The cast is uniformly excellent and the story is exciting with great location photography and visionary scenes on how Coleridge composed and got the ideas for his masterpieces, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" and "Kubla Khan," and the moving "Frost at Midnight." It is a great movie and great sadness, showing the arc of the two poet's careers. It avoids the stilted language and imagery of former historical epics and is as fresh as if these poets come alive now in the 21st century. A movie to treasure and share. Highly recommended. May it lead its viewers to appreciate poetry and poets more and elavate them to a high place where great words and visions are created and cherished.
Rating:
Summary: Brilliant all around masterpiece
Review: "Pandaemonium" is truly a tribute to two of the great geniuses of English Literature--Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth. All aspects combine together to create a masterpiece for all lovers of poetry AND Romantic Poets. I teach English 9-12 and a class on the Romantic Poets so I know my stuff and was completely blown away by the beauty and dedication of the movie. It doesn't pull punches with the opium addiction and Coleridge's usually cold marriage to his wife Sarah. Lord Byron makes a cameo. I was slightly disappointed that there was no room for introducing Asra--Mary Wordsworth's sister and Coleridge's obsession--but that side story doesn't detract from the overall experience. I cried at the end because "Kubla Khan" is truly his masterpiece and a beautiful work of literature. I will be showing this movie the first week of school with my Romantic Poet's class. It's a must! I just wish there was something equally brilliant about my true poetic love John Keats!
Rating:
Summary: A Great Movie about Great Poets
Review: "Pandaemonium" just might be one of the greatest movies ever made about poets. There are very few that I've seen that haven't been superficial, over the top or boring. This movie is sublime. The story of Samuuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordworth makes grand entertainment and exciting drama. Linus Roche is a bundle of wild energy as Coleridge, with his addiction to opium (laudanum) taking center stage as a symbol of his ups and downs in his creative energy and mental health. John Hannah is very good as Worthsworh, a poet totally different than Coleridge but bound together at first for the common cause of writing great poetry. The cast is uniformly excellent and the story is exciting with great location photography and visionary scenes on how Coleridge composed and got the ideas for his masterpieces, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" and "Kubla Khan," and the moving "Frost at Midnight." It is a great movie and great sadness, showing the arc of the two poet's careers. It avoids the stilted language and imagery of former historical epics and is as fresh as if these poets come alive now in the 21st century. A movie to treasure and share. Highly recommended. May it lead its viewers to appreciate poetry and poets more and elavate them to a high place where great words and visions are created and cherished.
Rating:
Summary: Great Flick!
Review: Although I am biased, I enjoy anything Linus Roache plays in. This is great BBC Film Noir.
This historical appetite in this movie is lacking. The film is great for thinking, and expanding your horizons on the film character. I find the acting to be quiet good, believable, and quirky. The British have a way of making a film that our, "Hollywood," cannot. If you purchase this film be prepared to be amazed at the characters, and their development. I do not give away total plots or more than my feelings in my reviews beacaue I'll not ruin it for future viewers. Interpretation is always as individual as ones tastes! Enjoy this fine BBC offering. The time travel scenes are to make their point well known, and in a timely manner. The flight, and destruction of man is present here. I never knew opium could be such a creative juice for poetry, or anything else. I do like that justice for the betrayer is done in the flick.
Rating:
Summary: Film with 2 Great Attributes....Temple & Roache
Review: Attribute #1 is that director Julien Temple shows us rather than tells us his vision of poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge and his creative process, especially given that STC was an obsessive-compulsive, addictive, visionary genius. I liked director Temple's "Absolute Beginners" but I adore this work. Attribute #2 is actor Linus Roache who plays Coleridge. Roache knocked me out before in "Wings of the Dove" and "Priest" and he does it again here. He is an incredible talent and I'm beginning to lose count of how many leading men actors from the UK I can say this about! It seems as if acting talent must move within the populace there like a virulent virus. This is a very artistic film with Temple's and Roache's collaborative efforts. Some viewers are complaining about historical accuracy but all I can say is that I wish this film had been around when I was studying "The Ancient Mariner" in high school. It would have been experienced then as an intense multi media event. I hope some 10th grade English teacher somewhere is using it that way. Everyone else in the film does a very fine job too. The production values are marvelous. It wouldn't be the film it is though without Temple and Roache blasting us within every frame.
Rating: 
Summary: I AM NOT A SNOB....
Review: but this was brutal. I have been looking forward to seeing this from the minute I heard it was being made. Right up front I will say I am a Coleridge fantatic. That being said the historical liberties that were taken to make this a coherent - compact story were so ridiculous that it distracted from the story. Just me? Maybe...but my wife thought it was pretty horrible as well. That Coleridge was portrayed as meeting Worsworth in the movie 2 years before they actually did (no big deal I guess); the totally fictional account of Kubla Khan's creation (even Paul Harvey knows the true account); So Coleridge get's high on Opium and writes the "Rhime" in one night - the movie would have us believe it; Sara Wordsworth in the midst of severe brain damage saves the day by reciting Kubla Khan in front of Byron (ah...no!)... Being a "Coleridgean" I dislike Wordsworth as much as the next "Coleridgean", but I have a hard time accepting he was as evil and inept as they portrayed him. I just don't understand why anyone doesn't take time to read the SEVERAL detailed accounts of what really happened in their lives based on Coleridge's and both Wordsworth's journals/diaries? The movie was not a complete bust though - there were some very lyrical moments especially the "Frost at Midnight" sequence; the cinematography; especially in the Lake District, and some great details about their appearance and writing styles etc.. - but all it would have taken was to read the "real" story to write and direct a "real" good movie. I guess my point is that the story was already great - why tamper with fictionalizing it so much?
Rating: 
Summary: amazing, but why the full frame?
Review: First of all, no, the movie is not historically accurate, which I assume the filmmakers were well aware of. However it is not a "Hollywood" version of their lives either. What it does capture, quite wonderfully, is an immediacy that most period pieces simply do not achieve. We are brought into the lives of these two poets, their hopes, dreams, aspirations, failings, etc, that a standard historical biography would not have found possible. we are given, instead of a historical timeline put to film, a more revolutionary approach that almost contemporizes Coleridge while remaining firmly entrenched in the period that these men lived, reenvisioning and reawakening the ground-breaking nature of the work that Coleridge and Wordsworth produced, and giving their long-dead poetry a new life of sorts. I would like to see the director do a further film concerning Shelley and Byron, who are pretty much nothing but bit characters in this movie. (And I'm sure it would have to be better than the completely dissatisfying Gothic). The reason only three stars? For some reason, most copies of this film on DVD are full-frame, and the widescreen version, rare at first, has become seemingly impossible to find. A brilliant, though at times fictional, take on the lives of two extraordinary men.
Rating:
Summary: This is a poem, not a documentary!
Review: I am not a historian, and have not read either William Wordsworth's accounts of his relationship with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, or visa versa. Before going into this film I was vaguely aware of their friendship, turned rivalry. Based on the 2 reviews available on Amazon.com, I almost didn't buy this DVD.However, I weighed the facts: I love both the poems of Coleridge and of Wordsworth that I have read. They are epic and broad in scope, as well as eloquent and lyrical. I am also an admirer of both Linus Roache and John Hannah's work, and find Julian Temple an interesting director to say the least. I thought: how bad could this combination be? My didactical reasoning won out and I bought and viewed this film, and I'm glad of it. And I can only recommend that others follow my lead. Is it historically accurate? As far as I know, which is not a lot, in this matter - no! That said, it is trying to make a statement, not be a documentary. Is Wordsworth displayed as an ogre in favor of praising Coleridge's drug-assisted genius? Not really. Wordsworth's opinion - that Coleridge's genius was not worth every price - was fairly portrayed in the film. Coleridge's drug addition is also not prettied up, or made to look romantic. Fair is fair. They were both geniuses in their own right, but - like us all - mortals as well, with all the flaws that go with it. They obviously became rivals, which is also - unfortunately - very human; we the audience have the opportunity to recognize that we don't need to choose between them. Panning this film for its historical inaccuracies is like the Maritimer shooting the albatross...it goes against the nature of the thing. Experience the film as a poem, and relax about the details. Isn't that what both of their poetry tried to teach us? Beautifully acted and magnificently filmed. Please give this little gem a chance!
Rating:
Summary: Very Enjoyable Film--Definitely Not Boring or Stodgy
Review: I saw the movie on DVD and really enjoyed it. I was reminded of a similar film, _Haunted Summer_, which portrays the meeting of Percy Shelley and Lord Byron. I guess I thought Wordsworth and Coleridge were more friendly than this (and maybe they were) in reality. The film sure is biased towards Coleridge. Wordsworth comes off very badly--he gives up on his revolutionary principles, marries a shrewish wife, and seems only interested in how he will be viewed by posterity. Wordsworth goes to visit Coleridge and to collaborate with him, but can't seem to put a single word to paper. Then, suddenly, _Lyrical Ballads_ is finished and published and filled with Wordsworth's poetry! The performances are excellent, particularly Linus Roache as Coleridge and Emily Woof as Dorothy Wordsworth. The film is a bit odd at times, with jet trails moving across the skies of the 18th century, but it does a great job of getting at the creative impulse, showing the feverish bouts of imagination that gave rise to Coleridge's _Rime of the Ancient Mariner_ and the fragment _Kubla Khan_ (interesting that it shows an interruption by Wordsworth as the cause of STC losing his train of thought). Also, the scene with frost forming on the window while Coleridge cares for his son Hartley, leading to one of his more memorable early poems, is a standout. This film is well worth your time and isn't the boring, stodgy take on biography that some might be fearing.
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