Hereafter

Released: 2010
Drama
Starring: Matt Damon, Bryce Dallas Howard, Cecile De France, Frankie and George McLaren
Director: Clint Eastwood
Running Time: 129 minutes
Rated: PG-13

The breakdown: Clint Eastwood's study of how faith and death affect different people.


I've seen quite a few bad movies lately, so this one was a nice change.
The main story is focusing on 3 people and how death has affected their lives in one way or another.  Matt Damon plays someone who can talk with dead people, but doesn't want to and yearns for a normal life.  Cecile De France plays a French television journalist who briefly dies while caught in the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, but is revived.  Then there's a little boy from London who loses his twin brother in a car accident.  The first 10 minutes of the film focuses on the tsunami and the special effects were pretty good.  Clint Eastwood usually makes good films but I really didn't know what to expect with this one.
I think parts of it were really very slow at times, and by far the most interesting character is Matt Damon's.  I only sat through the other two characters because the movie alternates scenes with all the characters so to see his story you had to sit through the other two and of course, eventually, they all link up at the end.  You know, it used to be if you had an ensemble cast that meant they were all in the movie together at the same time.  Now, it means it's a movie like Babel, where all the characters have their own separate story to tell but they somehow all link together at the end.  Anyway, this movie wasn't the best I've ever seen, but it certainly wasn't the worst either.

I give it a 3 out of 5 because I feel they should've taken the most interesting character out of the three and focused on him more and made the other characters just slight parts of the movie (with much less time on screen).