Backlight (2010)

The premise of the movie was interesting; the actual execution was terrible. The actors were quite good, but the dialogue was unrealistic and made the characters appear stiff.SPOILERS:The time travel premise was interesting and I kept waiting for it to happen or be disproved. But, it just fizzled. I couldn't figure out if the audience was meant to guess that it happened at the end or not or if the writer/directer just didn't know how to execute.While the overall theme seemed to be hopeful, even spiritual, especially when characters crossing each others paths led to good things, the ending was a punch to the gut. I could forgive the slowness, the bad dialogue, deus ex machina, but not the ending. A character who is saved two people's lives, is about to reunited with his long lost love, dies!! No, time traveling (which talked about the entire movie) for him to go back and get his true love, become a doctor and live a happy life. He dies from a bee sting in the dessert after he uses his epi-pen to save another man's life.Very disappointed with the ending. I felt cheated.

I am not going to give it a perfect score because unfortunately it reminds me a lot of Crash or Babel or even Magnolia from 1999. I also have to agree with a few reviews that mention the repetitive soundtrack along the movie!!I do think that the director chose to use it in order to provide some "movement/emotion" through the scrip so maybe not using it would change the whole feeling!It's visually astonishing with thatpart of the States represented. Not a great acting from none of the actors - even Joaquin D'Almeida didn't have much room for a great performance. I feel the scenario, soundtrack and script and also the slow motion scenes and flashbacks made the movie!Congrats to Fernando on that but overall, in my opinion it is a bit too dramatic and to easy to guess "what's happening next"! The end was just like...I bet he's gonna die over a bee!...Not a boring movie at all and a very good attempt for a Portuguese director!!

I pretty much agree with everything Yarso86 said, with the exception that I was bored by the film when it wasn't even halfway done.By far the scenes between the mother and daughter are the worst. The actress who plays the mom is completely over the top, with utterly absurd reactions to everything the daughter says, and the lousy script doesn't help either. Their story is also the worst, with a completely absurd and pointless plot device that makes absolutely no sense at all. It reminds me of something akin to a Goosebumps or some Nickelodeon TV episode.Also, there's some voice over work in the beginning of the movie that makes me think that the post-production was done in Portugal and they couldn't find an American English native speaker so they got a Portuguese who does a fake American accent that just deteriorates as he reads his lines, which get progressively worst, using expressions that no American would use.To top it all off, the best actor in the whole film, Joaquim de Almeida, an actual international actor with serious work under his belt with some of Hollywood's biggest stars, only gets half a dozen lines of dialogue in the whole thing, mostly talking to himself, although in retrospect that makes sense because he would pretty much shame any of the other actors in this film who tried to be in the same scene as him.Image wise,like Yarso said, some of the footage has that very clean HD look, which becomes very camcorder like in some scenes, seriously clashing with the beautiful (and often overused) slow-motion shots.I'm giving it a really low rating because I honestly believe that what's already on here is over-inflated out of a misplaced sense of national pride.Again, like Yarso said, the director does actually show some promise, but he really needs to back away from script writing.

I was really excited to go and see this movie in the theater. It seemed interesting enough, conveying some kind of powerful message, and i usually like these kinds of movies. But halfway through the film i was already feeling really disappointed. The story is pretty predictable (i kinda guessed the end halfway through the movie), basic and a bit blah. You keep expecting it too pick up but it never does. It's entertaining enough (it didn't bore me to death), but it lacks something. The relationship between the mother and the daughter is completely unrealistic, and so are the links that join all the characters together in the end. It's okay if you want to rent it from your local DVD rent store, but don't waste your money on a theater ticket.