StunnaKrypto Self-important, over-dramatic, uninspired.

BoardChiri Bad Acting and worse Bad Screenplay

AshUnow This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

Helllins It is both painfully honest and laugh-out-loud funny at the same time.

yourgoddess08 Truly a disgrace to the film industry. I am disappointed to have seen it, and I consider it to be the worst film I have ever viewed. Yes, I have also seen Transformers. Patrick Keiller's "Robinson in Space" is more or less a dully narrated, almost stream of consciousness, that could have come from a novel. A novel, as it were, written in journal form of one man's trek across England with his friend, Robinson. No characters are presented, no actors, nothing of particular interest other than simple, usually stationary, shots of landscape, buildings, and a few leaves. Usually, a connection can be made between the shot presented and the narrator's words, although this is not always the case. I have forgotten the plot, if there ever was one, as well as the ending, or why the narrator and Robinson were ever in England to begin with. I am afraid the point has lost me entirely, and the film seemed painfully long. The occasional panning shot was much like a breath of fresh air to a drowning man, and the film as a whole has given me a new appreciation for watching grass grow. In this respect, I thank the director deeply. I am told that the film reflects on the industrial state of England and the decline of employment. For the sake of those represented, I hope a better film has been made in their defense. Save yourself the effort, and if anyone offers you this film, throw it back at them - hard.

Polaris_DiB In sort of the tradition of Sans Soleil, a narrator and a mysterious, unshown character wander around London searching for what they already expect to find: lack of absolution and a post-modern depression. There's more of a narrative thread in this one than Chris Marker's epic travelogue, but many of the concerns are the same: the way space, time, memory, history, and geography are collapsed and immutable when viewed from the perspective of an erring camera. Robinson wants to be a spy, but James Bond is a Western fiction more disturbing than its happy endings. They want to visit Sherlock forest, but it's closed off by private property. Most architecture (Keiller is an architect) and photography is extremely rectilinear, and nowhere the two characters stay are very comfortable. Such speaks to the isolation of a spectator of London, a space not built linearly or really quite as open to tourism as other large city centers.The story here is quite blink-and-you'll-miss-it. Robinson in Space is a visual essay that is familiar with academia and theory, and yet I've read too many responses to this that complain about it being an insufficient tour guide. Be aware that this is not a map of London (in the theoretical sense), but a deconstruction of it. People interested in discovering more about the mainstream culture and history of London are better off renting something else.--PolarisDiB

christopher-underwood I disliked this as much as I enjoyed the earlier, London, released in 1994. The reason, I think is that I know more about and care more about London, and much as the first film was almost gleefully depressing in its portrayal of a dead place under the Conservative party, I know the predictions were wrong. The London film remained interesting because of the difference between how it was seen by Keiller 15 years ago and how it is today. Whereas here I am less intimately involved with the various places depicted and Scofield's uninterested and expressionless verbalisation of the drivel of a soundtrack helped not a lot. It is also interesting to note that the general socialist drift of this film has also been shown to be wrong. All those sarcastic remarks about lack of British manufacturing and dark murmurings about the Japanese taking over, all seem irrelevant as an expanded service industry and tourism helped by cheaper imports from China and India, seems to have more than filled the gap.

gray4 This is a lovely film, narrated perfectly by Paul Scofield. Robinson and the narrator take seven tours of the English provinces, emulating Defoe's tours two centuries ago. You never see the travellers but they discover an awful lot about England that you probably never wanted to know - but are never boring. The superbly shot scenes of a changing industrial landscape are largely still - frozen in the 1990s and already remarkably dated, so that the film is already nostalgic, though only seven years old at the time of viewing. The commentary gives a detached perspective on England's industrial decline, as well as the occasional - and odd - glimpse into Robinson's private life and the mysterious company employing them to make these journeys on what might be a weird form of industrial espionage. The overall effect is to provide a strikingly different perspective on landscape, history and those who travel through them - a great success and all too short at 80 minutes.