Entertaining from beginning to end, it maintains the spirit of the franchise while establishing it's own seal with a fun cast

The acting in this movie is really good.

Great movie. Not sure what people expected but I found it highly entertaining.

The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

This is a great film with a lot of strong philosophy weaved in, I'm not surprised to find that there is a great book behind this film. The central plot for the film is a 2D world and two factions within it. Right from the start of the film you are bombarded with parallels to reality and its hard not to get distracted by your own thought chain, in a good way :) The CGI is as good as it needs to be to tell this story, the yellow sphere that you'll have seen if you've read this far is a bit misleading - the film has its own unique style that extends further than such basic geometry and reflections. The actors voice overs are quite good, the film isn't amateur and there is a lot of narration to help the story along.My main criticism of the film would be an excess of narration - sometimes its useful but other times its downright patronising and by the end you end up sighing every time you see narration.

This version of the tale tries the most to update the film to a modern audience, and that is its chief failing. The original tale was called a Romance, and this updating removes that very concept from the story. While it follows much of the novella's narrative- in describing the way Flatland works (although the original's King is replaced by a President- who oddly still wears a crown), it departs severely from the original at its most crucial moment, once A Square is visited by A Sphere from Spaceland. In this version, instead of a mystical guide, along the line of the Three Ghosts Of Christmas from Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, A Sphere is CEO of Messiah, Inc. OK….if the mere mention of that plot point has you rolling your eyes, you are not alone. And the attempts at satire only go downhill from there.Instead of Sphere's lifting up of Square into Spaceland being a religious experience, in this film it merely serves as a 'wow' moment used to lead into some cheap gags, jokes, and a display of Ehlinger's animative chops. The story dissolves. Then there is some cheap and rather predictable satire of consumerism and the current Iraq War, which will severely date the film in coming years, as well as a not so funny portrayal of a Spaceland Senator Cube who sounds very much like Ted Kennedy. In the novella, the satire, while based in Victoriana, dealt more specifically with human foibles grafted onto the polygons of Flatland. Here, the polygons of Flatland and the solids of Spaceland are almost total caricatures- such as the gay sounding Flatland Senator who leads the dissenting Chromatist movement, and is assassinated by President Circle's henchmen.The film is best when sticking to the book's original points…. The DVD comes with an autographed thank you from Ehlinger, but the disk itself has only the film and a brief trailer. Even though the film is low budget, couldn't Ehlinger have included a commentary by himself and others? It would have at least made the DVD, if not the film, worth a bit more, on a level of interest. In this day and age, not doing so is a bit of a ripoff- small budget or not. On a real world note, the slim case DVD package the DVD comes in also has a bad holder for the disk. The disk is far too small and the disk cannot stay in its holder. While a worthwhile effort, Flatland: The Film takes on too much, misses where the book succeeds, and its ending is just bad. But, Ehlinger does show a flair and unique style. If he continues in animation, here's hoping his next film is about the same quantum leap up from this one that Spaceland is from Flatland. If it is, then we'll have a film truly worth all the praise this one has gotten.

If I had a dollar for every time I walked out of a movie theater griping about how Hollywood has run out of ideas, I'd be a rich man. Lately I have been on a spiritual search if you will, to find some truly unique movies and Indie films seem to be the grail. Flatland was an impulse buy for me and I must say that this was the most unique movie experience I ever had. Nothing I'm aware of is more thought provoking for people who like discussing UFO's and Inter-dimensional travel. I can't think of a genre this film fits into. This is a thinking person's film and since I've seen it, I've been trying to explain to my cat what a solid is. I've also named her "Pea Brain". You can bet this film will get some serious looks from the big movie houses.

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.