Flatland won't get any flattery from me.It looked like it was going to address some interesting political matters, but I had to give up after 20 minutes despite my passion for animated films. I have no problems with visual minimalism but,first of all, this piece seriously overuses text insertions, half of which we don't even have time to read entirely. If one is incapable of telling his story through drawings, one should seriously consider using a narrator.Secondly, what I found really, really upsetting was the sound. The acting is uniformly terrible, and some of the voices are painful, plain and simple. Unbearable. I'll never know if a good story was told here, for it was unwatchable due to the poorness of its delivery.On an irrelevant side-note, I couldn't help but think there's a simple mistake in the design: women are lines while men are shapely. I would have imagined the opposite. And I wonder why everyone had to be so straight. As if 2D wouldn't accommodate curves...

The premise had me gripped, as did the opening five minutes. But execution is disappointing and I can't help feel that here is a film of potential genius wasted by bad voice talent, bad script editing and a lack of proper characterisation.Flatland, let's be brutally honest, is a film for geeks by geeks. The idea just appeals to nerds and if you're a nerd, chances are you'll love this film. The whole mathematical purity will just hit the right buttons and you'll enjoy telling your friends all about the innovative 'angles' (excuse the pun) and clever 'parallels' with modern philosophy. But truth is, nerds don't write good scripts because they forget that behind every great story idea is a driving engine called character. And in Flatland, it ain't just the graphics that are two dimensional.There are other reasons you can tell there are nerds at the steering levers. The producers just don't know what to do about women. Nerds see. Women are dangerous, incomprehensible, flat lines with no substance. When they get in the way of the plot, the women eat themselves. When the men in the movie display chauvinism its dismissed with a knowing wink and a few lines of humour.Then there's the plot. Politics, oppression and war wrapped up with a Messiah prophecy. It's not exactly ground breaking.Visually the film is interesting. But there's just too many dimensions missing to make this as good as the other reviews suggest.As a cheap, badly voiced, badly directed indy attempt its good for a look-see. But you'll go away wondering if, out there somewhere in a parallel universe, there's another version of you enjoying a much better, more 'rounded' film where women actually have active roles, the characters have personalities instead of plots to further and there's a bit more to the whole thing than just 'oh wow, lets have fun with dimensional space'.A missed opportunity. But possibly worth a look simply because it's so... different.

Flatland is one of my favorite books, thus I was looking forward to this film. Unfortunately, the film is absolutely horrible. The dialog is so bad it sounds like improv half the time. The new storyline makes me think they took the book and a couple of newspapers, threw them in a blender and used what came out for the screenplay. It's a disgrace to the book and independent film making. The only reason I even managed to get all the way through the film was my hopes that it'd get better. Unfortunately, it only got worse, climaxing in a really retarded ending.That's not to say EVERYTHING about the movie is bad. The CG is acceptable, in a 1990's "Reboot" sort of way which I assume is what they were going for. And I suppose you can't go wrong with "people" getting chopped in half and gushing blood all over the place.

For the Limited Edition DVD-R. This film was leagues more interesting that I expected it to be--my girlfriend REALLY wanted to see it, though.Lay back, sort of sleepy, watch the film. Some early on-screen direction annoyed me but it didn't last far into the film.I'm not familiar with the book, but this film is a helluva lot of fun and it brings about some great self-questioning about the perception of consensus reality.The creativity expressed in the various worlds was quite amusing. And it's mostly a family film but there's some language kids might repeat the next day at school (and get in trouble) and there's some very strange violence :)Well worth a shot, though.