Powerful

I like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.

It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

In The Tradition Of Movies Like Crash, Magnolia (A Brilliant Movie), Babel. Pulp Fiction We Follow 4 Different Stories As They Slowly Weave Together Becoming In The End One Story ... Ryan Phillippe Is A Detective Seeking Justice For A Dead 6 Year Old Girl ... Bernard Hill A Worried Father Looking For His Lost Son ... Sam Riley A Man Looking To Replace The Love He Has Lost ... Eva Green An Artist That Suffers Through Multiple Suicide Attempts For Her Art ... These 4 Lives Are Thrown Together In What Appears To Be A Perfect Religious Society ... Like The Movies This One Imitates This Is A Brilliant Story That Reminds Us That As Large As The World Is It Is Very Tiny In The Scope Of All Things ... We Are not Alone, We Live, Suffer, Laugh, Cry, Rejoice, Etc .. Together ... The Writing Is Excellent As Well As The Acting ... Special Credit To Gerald McMorrow's Direction, His Ability To Keep Such A Huge Story In Front Of The Camera From Beginning To End Was Amazing ... Also It Would Be Wrong To Not Mention Those Who Handled The Production Design, Art Direction, Set Decoration And Costume Design ... Original And Enticing This Is Not A Movie To Be Missed ... In A World Gone Mad Hope Survives

It is hard not to feel you need your brain in overdrive after the first fifteen minutes of this film such is the constant tripping between Meanwhile City and London, but, as the characters develop, and their personal tales unfold, the film becomes strangely obsessive and compelling. The acting of the four main leads, Ryan Phillippe, Bernard Hill, Eva Green, and Sam Riley is superb throughout, lending the story a bleak feeling of reality only sporadically interrupted by the even bleaker visits to Meanwhile City. Stephen Walters also deserves a mention for his excellent portrayal of Wormsnakes.But this film isn't about being cold and bleak, it is about discovery and how even our quirkiest traits fail to stop us uncovering what needs to be exposed. Franklyn is much more than a competent piece of cinema with its twisting and turning, it asks us to revisit our many suppositions as the film unravels. And that is its main point: the journey IS worth it. And Franklyn is well worth its 7/10.

Billed as having a story from parallel worlds that collide. Not so, the utterly fantastic (and I believe should have been a film on it's own) world of Meanwhile City resides solely in the heavily delusional mind of the "central" character. The characters Milo and Emilia have almost no bearing on the films core story, they only become relevant near the end when they become "innocent bystanders" in the single-sided pseudo-conflict between the characters David and his father Peter.I believe that if Franklyn had been a story of two parallel worlds that crossed paths, and not simply a real world and a delusional world, then it could have been a truly great film.

I am frankly surprised almost to the point of shock that so many people have such a hard time following this movie. It is very straight forward in its story telling. The only reason i can imagine anyone *not* following it is either (a) confusion by the mislabeling of this film as a science fiction film (its not, its a psycho-drama) OR (b) geekish yearnings to make the sci fi setting 'real'. The ironic thing about (b) is that those people who do twist the world in such a way are, in fact, illustrating what this movie is all about-- which is the human ability to divorce ones perceptions from reality. The main characters exist in a spectrum of dissociation. (1) David/Jonathan Priest is a recently returned war veteran who is dealing with the trauma of the senseless death of his baby sister. Of all the characters, he is the most disassociated from reality-- to the point where he has created an entirely divergent internally-consistent reality for himself. We would call such a person "dissociative" or "psychotic" normally, but this movie shows him not as unique but merely as an extreme in a continuum of human behavior. (2) Milo created a fantasy friend. "Sally", as a child to cope with the death of his father. To him, Sally is part of his reality, a part that again is only part of his own perceptions. When his life hits a crisis of loneliness in the loss of his fiancée, he brings Sally back into his world. Again, we would view this as a lesser form of disassociation/psychotic break by our normal yardsticks. But there are even more shades here. (3) Emelia has also created a break with reality because of trauma, in this case her childhood abuse (sexual is suggested but never totally stated) by her father. Choosing to forget that and remember it as stories, not reality, she has substituted a desperate longing for a father that she thinks she lost, though chances are he never really existed as she remembers him. Rather then blame herself for the sexual abuse (as victims commonly do) she has substituted a blame of her mother for "taking her father away." She acts out her inner turmoil and attacks her mother through staged "art" suicides. It could be argued that these are also her attempts on some level to punish herself, but thats never developed in the movie. Nonetheless it generally takes either severe depression or severe guilt to bring one to the brink of suicide. (4) David's father has the same trauma that David has-- the traffic accident death of his daughter, David's little sister, In his case, he is clinging to a hard line religious explanation. That it was God's will and God's actions. This gives a senseless and horrible death, a little girl struck down by a car, meaning and allows him to deal with it. It can be argued however that this TOO is a disassociation from the reality that random horrible things happen without purpose or reason. That is a reality that many people we would consider "normal" to flee from and make up stories to hide behind instead. And in the end thats what this movie is about, as explained in the "story" that "Sally" tells Milo about the story teller who built a perfect world, but in the end walked away from it because it wasn't real. And the real and only question this movie leaves is that: what stories do WE live in rather then dealing with reality, and which is really better? Is believing in a cold, uncaring, random world more healthy just because it is "real"? or do we as human beings by our very nature live in worlds of fantasy in order to function? As for the final shot of the bucket and mob without the janitor by it, that is open for debate, but I see it as a "tease".. daring US to interpret the janitor's part in the film not as just one more random element in a random world, but as something with deeper and perhaps mystical meaning. The author leaves that for us, the viewers, to weave fantasies about.