TrueJoshNight Truly Dreadful Film

Protraph Lack of good storyline.

Aedonerre I gave this film a 9 out of 10, because it was exactly what I expected it to be.

Brennan Camacho Mostly, the movie is committed to the value of a good time.

puppyaddict Rating this a bit high (it's really a 7-8) because clearly there are some trolls out there panning it because they either just like to pick apart movies that overall are well done and enjoyable so that it makes them feel superior, or because they are completely unable to empathize with others (the characters), or they were expecting a horror/action movie like 28 Days Later. That is not what this movie was intended to be, but it does its job really well!This is, once over and done with, a heart-rending psychological thriller that will make you think you have it figured out, and then something slightly different in the characters' behavior makes you think maybe you were wrong--right up until the end. Acting is excellent (once you understand the full background and motives, all the nuances really make sense!), as is the direction, cinematography, and writing. Yes, there are a couple minor flaws in the logic of our protagonists (yup, I was thinking "why don't they clean and bandage his head?) but these things aren't really critical kill shots to the overall enjoyment of the movie, or how the plot and the characters' relationships to one another develop.Plus, I think unless you have walked a mile in the shoes of someone who has been through what these characters have, you cannot rightfully claim that they are behaving "irrationally." Everyone thinks that if they are in the liquor store when the robber comes in with a gun, they will be the hero who will see the potential of a makeshift weapon on a store shelf & use it to disable the robber. Yet most of the time in real life, that person, in the rare case when they actually manage to get past being frozen in fear throughout the ordeal (or going along with things to save their *ss), either ends up causing someone else to be very dead, or winds up very dead themselves. That's reality, and how someone might deal with their personal tragedies and secrets they are keeping for fear of losing the love of their life is I think not something we can judge for others. So I do find the characters, all three in fact, to be quite believable, and the antagonism we see from the wife is perfectly explained by revelations later in the film. Finding out the reasons behind their behavior provides an interesting window into the psychology many of us share, where our guilt over something causes us to project blame onto someone else, or to put forth anger or any number of redirected emotions.If you simply don't like slow-building thrillers (NO, this is NOT a gory horror movie), don't watch it. Otherwise, enjoy!

fedor8 Picture this: you're on a lone island, when out-of-the-blue a bloodied, exhausted, armed uniformed man appears. He says he needs to BOARD UP your whole house because there is a world-wide airborne plague that's killing everyone. So this virus… is it a foot long then? Perhaps he'd mistaken the virus for a large winged badger. It must be the largest virus ever found on Earth, about one hundred trillion billion times bigger than all the others combined, because it is evidently so enormous that it's incapable of passing through 3-inch gaps. So OBVIOUSLY the soldier must be lying. Right? Certainly you'd expect an educated couple – a journalist and an architect – to be at least half-way acquainted with Contagion 101 and Biology For Total Dummies to immediately question this stranger: "Oy, you: how the bloody heck do you expect to prevent an airborne virus from spreading by boarding up windows and doors? We breathe that bloody air, don't we? And as long as we have fresh air in the house that means some of that contaminated air is passing through. It's not as if only uncontaminated air molecules can slip through those openings… You bloody silly liar."Then again, I forget: journalists aren't the brightest cookies on this planet. They'd believe anything (just as they hope that we'd believe any old crap they write down). But if we eliminate the dummy journalist (Thandie), we're still left with the question how an architect (Murphy) could possibly be this clueless. Perhaps being metrosexual hampers his judgment? Dunno, just a wild guess.Due to the badger-sized flying-virus premise, from the start I didn't know what to make of this story. I had two clear-cut options/explanations: either there is a real plague out there but the movie's writers were too daft not to realize that airborne sickness can't be contained by simply nailing pieces of wood on windows, OR the soldier is lying which means we are dealing with a very dumb married couple. It's a no-win situation: either I have to contend with a poor script or with moronic characters. The common denominator of these two outcomes is certainly bad writing. Hence I knew something dumb was afoot.The other problem here is the typical movie-la-la-land conspiratorial the-army-is-out-to-get-us premise: a British soldier is used for biological experiments without his knowledge! Now, while some conspiracy-obsessed left-wing morons out there might consider this as a plausible scenario (because they hate democracies and consider every Western military institution to be some kind of devious, evil organization of the kind we see in computer games for daft 8 year-olds), I personally have grave doubts. First of all, in the UK there is plenty of money to be made by volunteering as guinea-pigs for medical testing. I have personally met several UK residents (all in their early 20s) who had done this, making an extra buck (as much as 100 pounds for a day's work) by spending a day or two, or a whole week in a variety of medical institutions. I.e. the UK military, if it really needed/wanted human test-subjects that badly, would easily find volunteers. There would be no need at all to conduct these tests on unwilling or unaware subjects, which would only pose potentially grave PR problems should this information be leaked to the media. (And unlike Marxist societies - which those same conspiracy-worshiping, gullible left-wing putzes so worship from afar in their comfy Capitalist-made sofas - in democratic countries such blatant and inhumane misuse of power does make it to the media very often.) Not to mention the laughable notion that the military would actually ALLOW someone to escape that easily from such an installation: all the way to a lone island even! If such human guinea-pigs existed in Britain, they'd be kept behind 5 sets of 10-meters thick steel walls and guarded around the clock by dozens of heavily-armed men. Now THERE'S a place from which even a molecule of air could not escape undetected.The only sensible and useful thing the writer/director could have done would have been to show Thandie Newton in the nude. That's the only potential I see in this script, and with this cast. The rest is baloney.

David Holt (rawiri42) Retreat could have been a good movie if the director had had his eyes open. Since the general plot has been dissected numerous times by other reviewers, I won't waste your time by repeating the story all over again.However, either the director thinks his potential audience are all a bit "slow" (to say the least) or HE is a bit slow himself. Why do I say this?Well, even though Martin and Kate are going through a small setback, surely that is no reason why, when they find an unconscious injured man on their island retreat, they shouldn't, at the very least, clean him up and dress his wounds. In such an environment there would be no doubt that their cottage would have been well-equipped with first-aid provisions yet all they appear to have done is drag the poor guy into the house and dump him on a sofa and then just sit and look at him! NO ONE would do that no matter how disturbed they were! The guy still has streaks of blood all down his face from open wounds to his head! Gee! I would sure hate to get shipwrecked on an island where they were the only occupants!Then, when he does come around, the stranger tells them what could well have been a true story albeit somewhat bizarre. But then, when he says that the virus is airborne and their house must be sealed up, no one thinks to ask what they are all going to breathe once it is and then, when he convinces Martin and Kate to actually decimate the building and board up the doors and windows, there are enough gaps between the boards for a vampire bat to fly through - let alone a minute virus - never mind the chimney! The premise of the story is plausible but its handling is pathetic! The fact that Martin and Kate actually bought Jack's story is an insult to the intelligence. I watched Retreat to the bitter end because I love Thandie Newton (and so the ending didn't please me one bit!) With a couple of exceptions, Cillian Murphy's character, Martin, was pretty lame. For example, he tells his gorgeous wife that he doesn't know what to do to ease her pain. How about giving her a great big loving hug for starters? There's poor Thandie (sorry, Kate) crying out to just be loved and all he can say is that he doesn't know what to do! I could go on but what's the point?Maybe another effort will be made with the story sometime in the future with better results. You know, I think that it should be mandatory for film directors to take basic courses in psychology so that, at least, their "normal" characters (as opposed to psychopaths who they can make as weird as they like) will behave like normal people do behave and not totally irrationally!

matthewchermside This film bears more than few similarities to another really bad film "Right at Your Door", which should send some potential viewers running from it. The characters are bland, the "plot twist" at the end was telegraphed from the beginning, none of it makes any sense whatsoever. What a waste of a talented cast this film was. Three incredible actors in Cillian Murphy, Thandie Newton and Jamie Bell are completely wasted in this tripe. As soon as Jamie Bell arrives in the film and starts barricading up the house without so much as any protest from Murphy's and Newton's characters I knew the film was going to be dreadful. The ambition of building tension is failed and the dynamics between the characters is completely screwed up, although Jamie Bell is very menacing, as the pretense is complete balls. Do not waste your time on this film, it is utter drivel.