Good idea lost in the noise

Best movie ever!

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

This has an excellent cast and production values but we gave up twenty minutes because it is so relentlessly grim and dark. Dread prevails, and a non-stop dirge thrums in the background. Very heavy-handed. The old 40's classic version is fun albeit rather dated, but it had wonderful atmosphere & fascination without the sense of dreadful, suicidal depression and nightmarish creepiness hanging over all - as this new version does. I don't think that Agatha Christie would have been pleased. The current taste is for shows to be utterly dark, with an emphasis on dank despair - and this is totally in that vein. If that is what you savor, this may be just your dish. Beware.

I did not enjoy this mini series. The first part was alright. Intriguing plot, good actors, good mystery, slightly spooky but that's kind of the point.Fast forward to the second installment which just plummeted. I found it unnecessarily gory and all the characters were just sick people. Not one of them was redeemable. Well, maybe the one played by Aidan Turner (his name escapes me, actually all of their names escape me because it is a memory I am trying to repress) simply because he's played by Aidan Turner. But all of the characters are just sick murderers. Sure the twist may have been a good one and I actually didn't see it coming but it still ended terribly. They all died in end making it feel like a complete waste of time. Frankly I hated it and I wish I hadn't watched it. I realise that there are other people who enjoy this sort of thing and that's good for them but I definitely do not. To be fair maybe I should have researched Agatha Cristie before watching this.

Let me not say too much, but just 'wow'! Not WOW with capitals, but a modest wow.I really enjoyed watching this. The characters are all interesting, the murder mystery concept scripted very well, the twist not obvious at all, but only very sharp and detail oriented persons may figure it out. The back stories provide insight in the characters which slowly reveals the whole. This mini-series has it all. Watch, but above all.... Binching required!One of those series that is best watched with the girlfriend or wife. (I have to fill up the 10 lines minimum)

And Then There Were None is one of my favorite novels of any genre, and was one of the first "grown-up" books I read as a kid. There have been many adaptations of it for the screen, from the solid but unspectacular 1945 black and white to the occasionally too- faithful Russian version to the absolutely dreadful 80s African safari. This, in my opinion, outshines all of them, remaining more or less faithful to the story and taking elements from the previous versions and using them to far better overall effect.The visuals are breathtaking; camera angles are brilliantly used (I particularly liked the scene of Mrs. Rogers throwing the leftover lobster carcasses over the side of a cliff), and the lighting and soundtrack give the whole production a disquieting, eerie feel to it that enhances the overall experience.The performances of the ten leads are one and all superb, particularly Anna Maxwell Martin as Mrs. Rogers, Charles Dance as Wargrave, and Toby Stephens as Armstrong. Notable among the "background players" are Rob Heaps as Hugo Hamilton and Paul Chahidi as Mister Owen's agent, Isaac Morris.And then there's the script...For the most part, Sarah Phelps' script is superb; more than any of the others, it gives the actors the most to work with in portraying the increasing mental stress and terror the characters are feeling. The cocaine party scene has become the most controversial in the production, but I feel that it works well, as the simmering tension among the characters finally explodes. Little touches here and there work very effectively, such as the role-reversal in Vera slapping an hysterical Armstrong after Rogers' murder. The antagonism between Lombard and Blore is the best I've seen in any of the adaptations, because there's a complexity to it that other adaptations lack.But if I do have nitpicks, it's that, like her predecessors, Phelps changes some of the material in ways that question whether she truly thought through those changes--specifically, the crimes which have earned each of the characters a place on the island, and the degrees of severity of those crimes which dictate the order in which the prisoners are to be executed.The biggest example is Blore's crime; instead of perjuring himself and sending an innocent man to prison, here Blore beats a young gay man to death. In the 21st century Western world, that's horrible. But as late as the 1990s, judges in the United States were jokingly asking if violence against gay men "was a crime now"; would a Victorian mind such as Mr. Owen's really view killing a "sodomite" worse than smothering an elderly woman, abandoning a servant girl, hanging an innocent man, or performing surgery drunk?All in all, however, this is a brilliantly made film, and one I intend to watch again and again for the sheer thrill of it.