Yeah, yeah, it's true what all the other reviews say, and you can see why Gerry Anderson publicly disassociated himself from the movie, but it's a bit of harmless entertainment. The problem is the expectations of an audience who grew up watching Thunderbirds on TV (and let's face it, with the frequent and popular re-runs that's every generation of kids from 1967 onwards, at least in the UK and US).
But if you can detach yourself from the emotional baggage the film is moderately entertaining. Let's look at the pluses for a moment. (It shouldn't take much longer than that.) It's fast moving, the special effects are competent, there are some good performances - Ron Cook as Parker in particular manages to capture the role's dead-pan humour without slavishly imitating the original - and some of the in-jokes for Thunderbird fans are okay. If you've got nothing else to do for an hour or two it's undemanding entertainment.
My 9-year-old daughter is a fan of the original TV series and she enjoyed the movie, though she felt let down by the tiny part played by the older Tracy brothers, who were the stars of the TV series. And that points to one of the two basic problems with this film.
With Thunderbirds, Stingray and Captain Scarlet, Anderson proved that kids' shows don't have to be ABOUT kids. They will happily identify with a group of adults so long as there's excitement and adventure to be had. There was no need for the whole Harry-Potter-esque bit (yes, we did notice that the characters of Alan, Tin Tin and Fermat correlated far too neatly to Harry, Hermione and Ron). It simply undermined the basic premise of the story and left fans feeling cheated.
Anderson's second great achievement was his no-compromise approach to production he didn't want to be producing puppet shows, and he pushed his team to new limits in making the series as realistic as they could, on relatively tiny budgets. The movie turns this on its head, and tries to make the human actors look puppet-like; where Anderson's designers paid meticulous attention to detail, the movie just doesn't bother. They even rub the message in with an excruciating scene where the Hood makes Brains walk like a puppet (accompanied by the classic line "I can control you like a puppet on a string," just in case anyone was still too stupid to get the joke). Anthony Edwards as Brains spends most of the movie looking like he wishes he was somewhere else, but in this scene in particular the actor's embarrassment is tangible. Let's not even go into the stutter.
Look at the London scenes: here we are, half a century into the future, yet the crowds round Jubilee Gardens are dressed in 2003 styles (retro-chic, maybe?) and the Police are driving 50-year-old Ford Focuses (must have been some serious cutbacks in the Met's budget!). The only change to London in 50 years is a new monorail which looks much like the 1970s model still to be seen trundling round Britain's National Motor Museum at Beaulieu (another in-joke Thunderbirds sometimes seemed to be monorail-obsessed, but perhaps we all were in 1967). It's sloppy and points to a production crew who just weren't taking the whole thing seriously.
And that, I think, why this movie has been panned so badly. It was made by people with no affection for their subject matter, and no respect for Anderson's achievement - and it shows. Perhaps they didn't realize just how much of their potential audience that attitude would upset. If you can overlook that, or if you have no strong feelings either way about Thunderbirds, you'll get a few laughs out of it.
True fans, meanwhile, should avoid this film if easily upset - they'll just have to wait patiently for the new Anderson-backed TV series of Captain Scarlet to emerge...
But if you can detach yourself from the emotional baggage the film is moderately entertaining. Let's look at the pluses for a moment. (It shouldn't take much longer than that.) It's fast moving, the special effects are competent, there are some good performances - Ron Cook as Parker in particular manages to capture the role's dead-pan humour without slavishly imitating the original - and some of the in-jokes for Thunderbird fans are okay. If you've got nothing else to do for an hour or two it's undemanding entertainment.
My 9-year-old daughter is a fan of the original TV series and she enjoyed the movie, though she felt let down by the tiny part played by the older Tracy brothers, who were the stars of the TV series. And that points to one of the two basic problems with this film.
With Thunderbirds, Stingray and Captain Scarlet, Anderson proved that kids' shows don't have to be ABOUT kids. They will happily identify with a group of adults so long as there's excitement and adventure to be had. There was no need for the whole Harry-Potter-esque bit (yes, we did notice that the characters of Alan, Tin Tin and Fermat correlated far too neatly to Harry, Hermione and Ron). It simply undermined the basic premise of the story and left fans feeling cheated.
Anderson's second great achievement was his no-compromise approach to production he didn't want to be producing puppet shows, and he pushed his team to new limits in making the series as realistic as they could, on relatively tiny budgets. The movie turns this on its head, and tries to make the human actors look puppet-like; where Anderson's designers paid meticulous attention to detail, the movie just doesn't bother. They even rub the message in with an excruciating scene where the Hood makes Brains walk like a puppet (accompanied by the classic line "I can control you like a puppet on a string," just in case anyone was still too stupid to get the joke). Anthony Edwards as Brains spends most of the movie looking like he wishes he was somewhere else, but in this scene in particular the actor's embarrassment is tangible. Let's not even go into the stutter.
Look at the London scenes: here we are, half a century into the future, yet the crowds round Jubilee Gardens are dressed in 2003 styles (retro-chic, maybe?) and the Police are driving 50-year-old Ford Focuses (must have been some serious cutbacks in the Met's budget!). The only change to London in 50 years is a new monorail which looks much like the 1970s model still to be seen trundling round Britain's National Motor Museum at Beaulieu (another in-joke Thunderbirds sometimes seemed to be monorail-obsessed, but perhaps we all were in 1967). It's sloppy and points to a production crew who just weren't taking the whole thing seriously.
And that, I think, why this movie has been panned so badly. It was made by people with no affection for their subject matter, and no respect for Anderson's achievement - and it shows. Perhaps they didn't realize just how much of their potential audience that attitude would upset. If you can overlook that, or if you have no strong feelings either way about Thunderbirds, you'll get a few laughs out of it.
True fans, meanwhile, should avoid this film if easily upset - they'll just have to wait patiently for the new Anderson-backed TV series of Captain Scarlet to emerge...