Best movie ever!

Absolutely Fantastic

A Masterpiece!

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

Scott and Lemon do a curious reversal of the 1960 film with March and Tracy in the same roles. Tracy played the Darrow character (defending Scopes) as a cool, rational lawyer (capable of indignation when defending 'truth') contrasted with March (prosecuting attorney) as an emotionally-driven politician with an enormous personal stake in biblical literalism.The 1999 remake has Scott defending literalism as the rational position, with Lemon dancing about railing against religious belief. This interpretation is neither true to the original trial, the text of the play, nor to the issues involved.In my review of the original I've note the historical inaccuracies of the play, which are no more bothersome than the impossibility of cloning dinosaurs from mosquito blood meals in Jurassic.I wish someone would do a play based on the Dover trial: the Nova special shows its inherent drama.

This version is just plain bad, which is shocking considering the talent involved! If you want to see the best version of this famous trial, skip all the remakes, and rent the classic 1960 film instead. To be fair to Scott and Lemmon, it's not that they are so awful, it is more like Spencer Tracy, and Fredric March were born to play these 2 characters, and they played them to perfection! Dick York, Gene Kelly, and Claude Akins, also brought a realism, and conviction to their roles of the teacher on trial, the reporter and the fire and brimstone preacher... respectively, that the actors portraying the same characters here, cannot come close to equaling. Skip this version, and rent the 1960 film, and judge for yourself.

Take two of the finest actors of modern times; put them in a screenplay with one of the finest scripts ever written; produce it through a cable channel that is renown for generating excellent movies, what you get has to be great. Fantastic. Superb! It stunk. I order a hamburger with more feeling than the actors showed mechanically reading their lines. I don't care where you stand on the core issue of this story, and I don't care if the story followed the real trial. That's irrelevant. The story is the story, and it's a great one. It's great, that is, when Spencer Tracy, Fredrick March, and Gene Kelly perform it. It compares like coal to diamonds with Lemmon, Scott, and Bridges in the all too dim spotlight. If you really want to feel the impact of this play, see the original. This is one case where filmdom didn't evolve a better product.

I have never seen a poor adaptation of this great American Classic,however if I were to choose the worst adaptation out of a good bunch this recent adaptation would qualify. George C. Scott made a very good Matthew Brady,However He was masterful in the role of Henry Drummond on Broadway in 1997.Jack Lemmon was merely adequate in Scott's stage role of Drummond and the two never seemed to make a connection the way Scott and Charles Durning did on stage,or the way Spencer Tracy and Frederick March did on screen. Beau Bridges was a fine,sarcastic E.K. Hornbeck and Lane Smith was a powerful hypocrite as Rev. Brown. The pace of this recent adaptation was slow and not as exciting as previous film versions. It was worth watching but not nearly as satisfying as the 1960 film or the Broadway revival.