Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

So much average

Best movie of this year hands down!

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

Possession (2002): Dir: Neil LaBute / Cast: Aaron Eckhart, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jeremy Northam, Lena Headley, Jennifer Ehle: Two movies in one with a theme of influence. Aaron Eckhart plays a literary student trying to piece together several letters written by a Victorian poet. Gwyneth Paltrow assists him and romance blooms. Dwelling on flashbacks is crucial to the story effect. The villains who attempt to sabotage their search serve no purpose. Director Neil LaBute previously made the intriguing dark comedy Nurse Betty, another film about someone inflicted with confusing messages. Here he successful combines romance and mystery within what can be called two films in one. Paltrow pulls off a sympathetic performance as a woman bent on solving a mystery of love yet finding it herself. She plays off her role with intelligence and wit while Echhart is effective as the determined student joining her in the mystery. One benefit is that Paltrow and Eckhart are not involved in a dimwitted rom com. Jeremy Northam, and Jennifer Ehle are superb in Victorian roles whose story effectively parallels the other but in a more tragic sense. Other roles are placed too far in the background to matter. Theme regards power of love and our dictation whether it will flourish or die. Final scene is significant upon how history can be affected by carelessness. Enchanting romance with stunning art direction and spellbinding parallels. Score: 8 ½ / 10

Let me start out by saying that I absolutely love the book. However, I tried to watch the movie unbiased, since even a failed adaptation might be quite enjoyable as a movie in its own right.Sadly, it wasn't.The movie had some (okay, maybe two or three) great scenes. Jeremy Northam (as Randolph Henry Ash) and especially Jennifer Ehle (as Christabel LaMotte) manage to convey intriguing characters, even with very limited time and dialogue. Too bad, though, that a movie revolving around two poets should contain so little poetry - Ash and LaMotte supposedly recognise each other as kindred minds and succumb to the power of each other's words, but what we actually see is just another pretty couple falling rather randomly in love. But whereas Northam and Ehle could still be quite believable as poets, Paltrow and Eckhart fail utterly as scholars. They do not say a single intelligent or scholarly thing. The only academic zeal they display is the occasional petty theft. They do not show any appreciation of their research subjects - Eckhart's character in particular seems too stupid to even copy-and-paste an undergraduate paper together, let alone to be the type of guy who would devote his life to the analysis of Victorian poetry. And I'm not even talking about the utter ridiculousness of Paltrow, with her perfectly plucked eyebrows and carefully applied layers of makeup, talking about her 'feminist sisters'. ...oh, Aaron Eckhart and his infuriating grin and pasted-on 'brashness' - how I wanted to punch him in the face. But I digress.Now and then, fragments of subplot can be discerned among the endless demonstrations of Paltrow and Eckhart's painful lack of chemistry. Mortimer Cropper occasionally pops up, but it is hard to tell why, since none of his brief appearances influences the main storyline in any way. (Apart from one of the final scenes of course, which I will not spoil, but here, too, he somehow conveniently disappears when it's time for Paltrow and Eckhart to steal the show again. They must have killed him off-screen, or something.) Also, a solicitor is introduced, but his function remains a mystery. The presence of these unnecessary elements is even more painful in the face of the absence of some much more obviously valuable ones - like Val, or Leonora. They could even have introduced an actual Roland, rather than two versions of Fergus Wolff! They could have used the time devoted to the useless solicitor by including some actual poetry!But, well, who needs poetry when we can have two pretty people kissing their way towards a cardboard happy ending?

The supremely literary and ambitious novel by A.S. Byatt has been streamlined into a more conventional love story for two beautiful Hollywood actors in this screen adaptation directed by (of all people!) Neil LaBute.Aaron Eckhart and Gwyneth Paltrow play scholars of a Victorian poet and poetess, respectively, who discover that their two subjects were romantically involved and find themselves in a race with rival scholars to prove it and change the face of scholarship forever. The film intercuts modern-day scenes of Eckhart and Paltrow falling cautiously in love with flashbacks to the two poets, played by Jeremy Northam and Jennifer Ehle. I found this literal and conventional approach to be the film's biggest failing, and couldn't help but think how much more interesting the film might have been if we had never seen actual reconstructions of the past and were left to visualize it along with the two scholars. However, to be fair, I don't know how that could have been done cinematically, so it seems churlish to hold the writer and director of the film to task for not doing it.Lovers of the book will undoubtedly find much to criticize in the film, as it leaves much plot and several characters out entirely, and is more interested in intrigues romantic than literary, but I thought it was decent. Eckhart is an extremely likable actor, and Paltrow is well cast, if a bit too conventionally beautiful for the role, and the two have quite a bit of chemistry. If one insists on holding the film to the same standards as the novel, it's bound to pale in comparison, but taken on its own terms, the movie is quite enjoyable.Grade: B+

I would have given this movie 6 stars if it hadn't spent so much of its time on the boring modern day researchers in the story. I have twice tried to read this book. The first time I returned it to the library almost entirely unread after losing patience with it quickly. The second time after being pressed to try it again by a friend who admired it, I tried harder but still gave up quite quickly. Frankly, I found it boring, wordy, and tedious in spite of an interesting theme. The writer just couldn't hold my attention.I like period drama which is partly why I watched the movie, the other reason being the actors include three favourites of mine, Jeremy Northam. Trevor Eve and Toby Stephens. Regrettably, Stephens' potentially very interesting part as a villain, though starting well, ultimately is small and towards the end more or less forgotten. Eve similarly. Northam playing the Victorian poet would be expected to have a major amount of screen time along with his beloved, but this doesn't happen. The director concentrates on the most boring characters in the book, the two dreary modern characters plugging away interminably at their research and sparring with each other until one hardly cares what they find out or what they feel about one another as they simply aren't exciting characters.I think my reaction clearly indicates this movie isn't as good as it could have been. A good movie should hold the attention even if not featuring all that much the actors you came to it for. So who's at fault - the story, the actors playing the modern researchers, or the director? I think the director. He had the opportunity to make a better adaptation of the book or to divide attention more fairly between the characters, and chose not to.But of course it depends on your point of view. I've no interest at all in the modern researchers. Others may feel the Victorian story is a minor issue and the emotional interactions of the two modern researchers are all that really matters.