Grenzenlos

I was tempted by the big names as the director and protagonists, and I am amazed how this quite compelling premise of a quality spectacle hardly worked at all. The romantic storyline between Alicia Vikander and James McAvoy is quite captivating, but only when they are together. Once they physically split up, everything kind of goes downhill. An attempt at a deeper message permeates the film, but figuratively speaking, it doesn't get to the bottom of it. What's more, it doesn’t even come close. In the end, there is only one thing to do - to admire the beautiful locations where the filming took place. (45%) (18.11.2020)

This is what absolute creative ineptitude looks like. This supposedly deep melodrama of a spy with a professor of bio-mathematics only has merit when the cameraman drives over panoramas of the UK coast. James McAvoy gets duller the older he gets, and surprisingly Alicia Vikander doesn't look extremely committed either. However, I would see the flaw there more in the way the characters are written. The whole time, they try to fit into our heads the fateful story of two different people who experience an intense romance in a magical place (which is fine) and, rather awkwardly, we then get to see the separation phase. So, for about half of the film we don’t really get to know the what, where, how, why of McAvoy's character, while Vikander's character acts like a pissed-off teenager for a while and then two minutes later she's wondering about the creation of the world. If they changed the director, didn't push the envelope so much and spared the sophisticated blathering, it would be about two classes better, because the acting potential is quite good and visually it's decently done. (16.04.2018)

Finding out that it's based on a book suddenly makes it a worse movie in my eyes, because the little details here that felt so civil, endearing, that shaped that look of a closed moment were probably just fragments of larger elements from the source material. The romance itself isn't silly, and at times manages to evoke memories of the agony of distant love and loneliness, but it still suffers from snobbery (the central couple meet and spend their days together in a luxurious European five-star hotel, so their days are framed by sumptuous lunches and the glare of the fireplace fire reflecting off their perfect bodies), and the contrasting cuts between the very different situations they both find themselves in after they part ways don't sit well either. You really have to go to great lengths to get any kind of experience here. (25.07.2018)