Simply A Masterpiece

Absolutely Fantastic

Great movie! If you want to be entertained and have a few good laughs, see this movie. The music is also very good,

There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes

Satire comes no darker, meaner or more malignantly funny than this strange, bold, brutally on-target end-of-the-world lampoon based on Michael Moorcock's corrosively sardonic cult novels about hipster anti-hero supreme Jerry Cornelius. Jon Finch (the sullen, untrustworthy lead cat in Roman Polanski's magnificent "Macbeth") is stone cold aces as Cornelius, a brilliant, carefree, easygoing and dry-humored bon vivant rich dude who gets involved with ruthless corporate tigress Jenny Runacre. Runacre wants to mate with irresistible stud muffin Cornelius in order to produce a New Messiah who will save the planet, which has really gone to seed, from impending mass destruction. Assisting Jerry on his perilous mission are a striking trio of horridly grotesque caricatures of specific establishment types, each one expertly hammed to colorful perfection by a well-chosen character actor: Sterling Hayden doing a deft reprise of his batty army general from "Dr. Strangelove" as a salty warmonger general, Patrick Magee as a melancholy professor, and George Coulouris as a cold-hearted, unscrupulous scientist are every bit as deliciously wicked and enjoyably broad as they should be.Adeptly written, directed and designed in an appropriately baroque and garish style by Robert Fuest, "The Final Programme" savagely sends up pride, greed, apathy (all the characters treat the world's unavoidable end like it was a minor, harmless inconvenience!), religious hypocrisy and omnipotence, self-indulgence taken to an appalling hedonistic extreme (y'know, partying your life away with an endless stream of sex, drugs and booze), and, most delightfully, even pretentious, self-important, overly solemn science fiction pictures (the uproarious conclusion, with the New Messiah turning out to be a wisecracking, blue-fingernailed apeman who impersonates Humphrey Bogart, mercilessly mocks the beginning of Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey"). The net result of all this acrimonious bile is a devilishly amusing and frequently black-as-coal pip. Appearing in nice bits are Derrick O'Connor as Jerry's estranged, out of it dope fiend brother, Ronald Lacey as an icy assassin, Julie Ege as an ill-fated tart, and Sarah Douglas (Ursa in the first two "Superman" movies) as one of Jerry's numerous squeezes. Acidic, incisive and unsparingly mordant, "The Final Programme" overall cuts it as a bracing, ferociously funny, uncompromisingly bleak, and bloody fine example of that rare odd bird: a genuinely successful sci-fi black comedy.

OK, I've seen it...nope, not making sense...watch it again...nope, not getting it...hang on, I'll read the book maybe that will help...nada...A sometimes fun, sometimes interesting but a thorough mess of a movie of a sometimes fun, sometimes interesting thorough mess of a book. It's like being in a time loop where Jerry Cornelius is always attending his father's funeral, always half-fancying his sister and always pursuing his brother Frank. Some of the sets like the nightclub "King Cool Flipped His Lid..." are well done, there are some amusing lines such as "I have a Phantom Jet parked outside...", "Shit, it's the Greek!" and "Hmmm, Rhesus positive" on merely touching a bloodstain. But very little is coherent; Miss Brunner "absorbs" her lovers but just what does that mean and how does she do it? Is it a post-apocalyptic world or not? What the hell happens at the end with a simian Cornelius/Brunner hybrid muttering about "what a very tasty world"? I'll give it this, Jon Finch turns in a great performance but this really is a beer n' pretzels ludicrous movie.

This is one of those spectacular misfires; Fuest has taken Moorcock's splendid book and cut everything down to the bone so much that what remains is only the irrelevant sci-fi plot that was basically a throwaway excuse to hang all the elements of the book together. For this there really is no excuse; the next two books were available at the time the film was in production (the last was not publish until 1977) and if anyone had bothered to read them, they would have realized that Jerry Cornelius ain't James Bond. This a cheap Bond rip-off. The books were trans-dimensional, time hopping wonders; they had an arrogance of plot structure that really captured the complexities of multi-dimensional realities. This is a chase movie. It has a conventional three-act structure and, worst still, it ditches all the characters vital to the novel (or amalgamates three, four or five of them into one). It misses out on Moorcock's views of sexual liberation and worst of all Fuest has absolutely no idea what his source material is about. After seeing the Dr. Phibes movies I thought him to be an entertaining and imaginative director. After seeing this I realize his style has nothing to do with imagination but a talent for making do with low budgets. The Final Programme was made for around £600,000. Not inconsiderable for the time but it is wasted in every frame on trivia. For example, an early chapter of the book revolves around a massive assault on Jerry's father's Chatauex in Normandy by a team of crack armed mercenaries with hundreds of casualties; here it is reduced to a bit of mild house breaking just outside London. Jon Finch's Cornelius is the only plus point about it (he was, after all, a friend of Moorcock) and what the books really need is $400 million throwing at them (they have to be filmed back-to-back), faithful adaption, and a director like Alejandro Jodorowsky. The books have recently been reissued in a bind-up as "The Cornelius Quartet". Read them; you'll be going back to them for years to come trying to unravel all the different strands. The film has no strands.

Sort of like Zardoz crossed with Planet of the Apes.The film is well acted, well shot, and the plot holds together... even though the Nazis are dragged in a bit, but not to the detriment of the film.It is allegorical, and rather clever twist on some poetry for those who have taken Humanities classes in school.Worth a look if you are new to film, and are looking for something out of the ordinary, that requires a bit of knowledge to hang with.