Solemplex To me, this movie is perfection.

SpuffyWeb Sadly Over-hyped

Fairaher The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

Ezmae Chang This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

FlorisV Interesting commentary on the damage done by loose morals developed from the late 60s. From the selfishness of hippie moms to sex crazed men going to special resorts under the pretense of spiritual enlightenment, only to get laid. The sexual "liberation" of the late 60s only led to selfishness and loneliness.Outstanding acting, particularly Bleibtreu and Potente did a great job. Also, the film provides a guilty pleasure as you can take a peek into how things work at various sex parties, it seemed quite realistic.While depressing at times the film can also be absolutely hilarious, at the same time. This can be accredited to Houellebecq who I've become more and more interested in.That said the movie is flawed, it feels unbalanced and missing too much. I was already interested in reading the novel and I definitely felt there were too many things left out, for instance I never saw the apparent marriage of Bruno. The film is quite rushed and ends rather abruptly. The scientific part also clearly played a second violin and didn't make much sense, as the subject of cloning and making a new human was too superficially touched upon.All in all a good way to spend 100 minutes if you are interested in a confronting view on the depressing inheritance the sexual revolution has left for us.

vonseux I think this movie have accomplished something very rare. It's an adaptation that respects the spirit of the novel but doesn't follow it blindly. That's very welcome because Houellebecque is notorious for his polemical discussions, something that would be very hard to fit on a movie or entertainment television. The Movie, then, avoids any major discussion of society, individualism, decadence, and the scientific fiction that closes the novel. It keeps things simple and offers viewers only the "story" of the two brothers, keeping the more hardcore stuff on the books. Photography is very colorful, casting is excellent. The new ending is beautiful. At the bottom, maybe the best introduction to Houellebecque's world.

18heavenly This is a plodding, clueless adaptation of Michel Houellebecq's novel of the same name. It manages to include many of the book's dialogs verbatim, while completely missing its point. The main evidence is the outrageous change of the conclusion - the director just mined the novel for catchy phrases and totally refused to tackle its challenging ideas. Or rather he was not able to notice them. Even apart from that, the adaptation is dumb. One example: when Bruno describes to the psychiatrist the biological details of the decomposition of a human corpse, he uses lines that are there in the book, down to the moths with "the names of Italian starlets" - but they belong to the narrator, not to Bruno! Such knowledge is completely inappropriate for his character.I don't mind the downplaying of the sex scenes - watch some porn if you have never seen it. The causality of the philosophy and culture of the times and the parents' lives on the lives of the main protagonists, the whole point of Michael's enigmatic life, the desperation of the obsession with sex and narcissism of the body, the sheer horror and cruelty of Bruno's existence, all this is downplayed to the point of absence. Houellebecq created a gripping world in his novel that you cannot shake off even if you think you know that he isn't right. The director produced a made-for-TV movie.

DaSchaust I enjoyed this adaptation way more than the book, which -- despite all the pseudo-intellectual hype that was raised about it -- was mainly about pornography, perversion, and a "philosophy" that can be formulated in short as: unless you are perfect, beautiful and brilliant, better kill yourself. And even if you are, there is ample reason to get depressed.By the way, it is not true that the director didn't try to talk to Houellebecq. But when he did the latter was seriously under drugs and hard to communicate with.In contrast, this film surely picked out some of the more digestible parts of the book and luckily didn't portray the characters as if they were only some of God's worst jokes. What came out was a beautiful and intelligent story about life, human relationships, and the choices that we face between keeping up love even under difficult conditions or, instead, going the seemingly easy way and losing everything.If that doesn't sound depressing enough for you, better go and buy the book...