8th Wonderland (2008)

I too was one of the unfortunate few people who had to suffer through this "movie", during a sneak preview night. Well at least the first 30-45 minutes of it, because that was when me and my mate left.I just can comment on the production value and the crafting, because until the moment I left I still had no idea what was going on in this movie. I only learned what it was actually about after skimming through the plot on the internet. Apparently some intellectuals try to make the world a better place. Watching the first 30 minutes it never occurred to me, that I was watching a bunch of intellectuals. It looked more like a bunch of students and stereotype bad guys. None of the actors left any impression what so ever on me or stood out. They all seemed pretty generic and replaceable.The production value appeared to be pretty low in general. Some scenes looked like they were shot in the actual living rooms of the "actors". Whole scenes looked like they were taken directly from youtube. At least they had the look and feel of some youtube videos. Some scenes were set in some kind of fancy chat room, that looked like an out-of-box after effects effect. In those scenes all they chat room participants were projected in a circle of screens, surrounded by some matrix-esqe code bits flying by. Compared to the broader spectrum of films those effects were pretty bad, but in this movie they actually looked neat compared to the rest.Do yourself a favor and skip this movie.

This is the first movie I ever walk out from (after suffering through it for an hour). Badly played, naive, and simply plain boring, it also lacks original ideas and is filled with long dialogues leading nowhere.There are too many characters for any of them to have any depth, the situations are sometimes grotesque (a girl casually reading the newspapers in front of her web cam while she is supposed to talk about a way to "save the world", another guy discussing secret schemes aloud in a crowded internet café, a CIA agent logging in and chatting aloud (too) with the wonderland group right next to his colleagues without them even hearing him?!). Anyone seems to be able to join the group, yet personalities and the CIA strive to gain access to the website?! After a while, you just wish the characters would shut up. Not only because their dialogues are bad, but because their acting is bad too and the situations are totally unrealistic.It could have been a great movie. It was greatly screwed up. And all the people leaving the room confirmed this impression. Thank you, come again!

I hope many people go see this movie. Because: A sorrow shared is a sorrow halved. If this movie was written by a five year old and made by a bunch of high-school kids, then it is OK. But I don't think that is the case. I can't tell you much about the movie, because I have seen only 30 minutes of it, but so have many people in the audience. After 20 minutes of this I have been betting with my friend that people would soon start to leave. But nobody moved. And since we were in the middle of a big packed theater I didn't want to be the first one to stand up. 10 minutes later my prayers were answered and the first few started to stand up. Within a few minutes I think a quarter of the audience left the theater.So what is the problem: Well the idea doesn't sound too bad. SPOILER > A group of people want to change the world and try to force it into changing the way they think by various acts of terrorism. So far so movie-realistic. But why are they people like: a model? (who has the time to join live-chat-conferences with the rest of the group during a runway presentation when she is supposed to change) a guy who is going to college to become a doctor and his fiancée. A Muslim girl who lives with her dad. And so on. How do these people find the time to organize crimes that involve abducting three of the best football players without getting caught? < SPOILER Never mind, I agree that it only takes great minds and determination to do all that. But the people of that group seem like they are hardly able to use the computers that connect them to one another. And then they go on discussing their aims and their beliefs in discussions that seem to last for half an hour, which can't be true because I have only seen half an hour of this school-production and there were at least two discussions. And also there is some really bad acting. Most actors did well, but two were so bad that I didn't know if they were supposed to be drugged and hysteric or simply annoyingly bad. There is nothing more I want to say about this. Only that I really like movies and up to this point there were only two movies I haven't watched till the end, both of them because the people I was with didn't want to stay until the end. But this one is the first I walked out on. I did have the thought with a few movies but I never actually did it. And with this one it took me only half an hour. Once again: if the filmmakers are under 18 years old I apologize if not: see above.

I dare say the audience at our local surprise sneak preview theater is a hardened bunch. Yes, some of us have been attending the traditional weekly sneak showing regularly for well over a decade. We have had atrocities like "House of 1000 Corpses" and "Street Fighter" forced upon us. But we still come back every Thursday. Maybe we *do* have a masochistic streak after all.And today we were served again with this cinematic dud that ranks up there with the worst of the worst. I don't know where to begin. The annoying visualization of "internet chat room", most likely an out-of-the-box Adobe Premiere effect. The fact that *everything* in this movie is conveyed by an unnerving, never ending, multilingual dialog where apparently the idea of quality was sacrificed for quantity. The cheap green screen technology. No characters to identify with. And the whole idea behind the film feels so flat and naive, it's a pain to watch. You could literally feel the audience detach from the movie in disbelief during the first fifteen minutes.For a student group assignment at a film seminar, this would be a fine work. But it's a long way from there to the movie theater.