The Triangle (2005)

Absolutely Brilliant!

Absolutely brilliant

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

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

A mildly entertaining film about the "Bermuda Triangle". It started off promisingly enough, but lost its way by the third part. There was an interesting premise and some spooky special effects, but I was disappointed by the pat and ridiculous ending. The Bermuda Triangle is an interesting phenomenon with long-standing mysterious happenings occurring within its boundaries, however, it was not well-served by this movie.The acting was all right, though Eric Stotz at times wasn't acting very well, particularly at the end. Also, Lou Diamond Phillips did a good job, but his easy acceptance of son Dylan was a bit hard to swallow. The Australian Doctor and Catherine Bell's Doctor were credible and Sam Neil as always did a great job. But the ending was a miss-mash of crap, pseudoscience, science, history and conspiracy theory and it didn't play well. Along with being unconvincing, I found it rather ludicrous and the ending utterly preposterous. I can give no more details here, except to say that fiddling with Time (which I discus in the next paragraph) should generally not be attempting haphazardly.I am always critical of films that try to involve time-travel, alternate realities and the like; the reason being that using these plot devises runs the risk of having to deal with the "Paradox Problem". The "Paradox Problem" is when you change something in the past, or affecting the past, that then causes the events which necessitated you having to change the past to not even come about, which then means that you wouldn't have effected the past, therefore the events which happened in the past would actually have happened, leading you then to change the pa.....see where I am going with this? You mess with Time in a movie and you will be asking for all of the Nerds of Nerdom to come and ridicule your film.The only way to deal with this problem is to either clearly delineate what rules of Time you are following and how you believe Time to behave or to have divine intervention. Those who write about time travel truly need to tread lightly............while the writers and directors of this film did neither.If you are interested in spooky sea adventure stories, I recommend "Ghost Ship" or "Triangle". Though not based on actual events, they are spookier than this movie is. For good movies about the sea, I recommend "Moby Dick" (with Patrick Stewart) and "A Perfect Storm". For more action-adventure films, I recommend both the original "Poseidon Adventure" and the remake "Poseidon".

This is a highly watchable three-part American TV mini-series about the Bermuda Triangle. If it were not for the corny title sequences, cheap models, and some inferior production design of historical reconstruction scenes, the series could be described as very good indeed. All the live-action filming of modern material is excellent. Sam Neill is extremely good as a rich shipowner who is haunted by the image of his lost twin brother who disappeared in the Triangle (Neill has also lost several ships and has commercial reasons for wanting to crack the mystery of the Bermuda Triangle). We often see shots of Neill staring into a mirror, with no one behind him, but the lost brother's face staring out of the mirror at him over his shoulder. Spooky! The main story itself is rather quirky and different, not a hackneyed approach at all. Neill hires an odd bunch of four impoverished researchers at $5 million apiece to try to solve the mystery of why ships, planes, and people keep disappearing inside the Triangle, and have been doing so since Columbus's time. The leading player is lean, freckle-faced, and eccentric Erik Stolz as an investigative journalist. He can hold a series together because he has lots of oomph. The most fascinating of the cast is Bruce Davison, who is absolutely superb at looking like a pasty-faced haunted psychic who really can see into the other world and never stops doing so. He has just the right expression in every scene. Of course, my favourite cast member was cutie Catherine Bell, the only gal in the team of four. She seems to be slightly cross-eyed, which never hurt an actress wanting attention, and has a very whimsical and appealing manner about her. One uncontrollably wants to give her a nudge and a wink, so that the lack of two-way communication when viewing her can be frustrating. She was definitely a successful bit of casting. The fourth team member is played by Michael E. Rodgers, who does very well as a scientist. In fact, this series works because the team of four is well cast and pulls it off. One major structural story weakness to the series is that the character Meeno, excellently played by Lou Diamond Phillips, takes two and a half episodes to get involved in the plot. It is a major mistake to give him such a time-consuming buildup for two and a half episodes, in which he does very well indeed, but leaving him hanging for all that time as a loose thread who just dangles and puzzles the viewer for far too long. That was very clumsy and misconceived. Another irritating aspect of the series is that we have yet again the most common and wholly unsympathetic stock character of all American series and films for the past twenty years, the embittered and angry ex-wife. We also have an embittered and angry wife. Sometimes I think I will scream if I see another American movie or series with one of those divorced harpies screaming at a pathetic ex-husband and withholding the child from him while she humps a hunk. They are all the same, and if they are half as common in real life as they are in modern American films, there would seem to be no hope for social life in the USA. After all, if all the women in America these days are embittered and angry, it is no wonder no one can find a job, as who would want to hire one of those grumbling, narcissistic, vitriolic harridans? I would say director Craig R. Baxley did a very good job with an under-budgeted series. As for the story itself, it gets pretty wild. Eventually the Philadelphia Experiment of the disappearing American naval ship from the 1940s comes into it and we hear a lot about time and space and wormholes. Thank God UFOs are left out of it. People dive a lot and pilot planes a lot and do daring things, all to be expected. Terrible storms with flashing lightning assail everyone on all sides, coming out of another time dimension. Parallel universes intersect with a crash and a bang. Navy planes that disappeared during World War II suddenly come flying into contemporary skies and almost crash into modern planes. People prematurely age, and a girl of six becomes a woman of 80 in three days. And no, this is not because they were saving on film stock. The poor woman is locked up by the Navy, who are the villains of the piece because they are trying to manipulate space and time by reversing the Philadelphia Experiment, which might bring all those sunken ships back up to the surface, and all the crashed planes back into the sky, and dead men back to life. The US Navy has built a secret base beneath the sea within the Triangle and is trying to do all these secret things, thereby putting the world in peril, and the team of four, by that time joined by Meeno, whose Greenpeace colleagues all drowned in the Triangle, have to stop the world being destroyed by preventing the reversal effect. It all gets very nerve-wracking, and I felt lucky to survive the viewing, what with all those sci fi threats to my safety.

One of the best Sci-fi has every put out, good enough to put in my movie collection. If you like thrillers for searching for the truth, not unlike x-files, then this movie does the job. Triangle puts a new theory on old myths. But its not some slasher flick like the junk that sci-fi usually puts, out this has an actual story, and you'll enjoy every minute of the movie, and narrative. Its a true pre-apolocyptic movie that puts together theories in well thought out way without over focusing on melodrama. Though the Characters are fully developed, no fluff characters, but no especially mean people rather just the stuff you would encounter with a beau-racy. Just great tension building and pace. I wouldn't say sharp dialog, like "the lion in winter", but you watch the movie for it conjecture, and its imagination.

The mini-series started very well. I just watched it on DVD for it's four plus hours. I found it entertaining but I found the climax lacking. In the final third of the film, it was difficult to keep the story lines completely straight. I thought I noticed two time line errors, and will have to re-watch it to determine if I reached for the popcorn at the wrong time. When Lou Diamond's character survives and comes home, he is apparently in a different time-band, (hello Stargate SG1) as he makes mention that his truck was blue. In the time-band that he returned to, it is not blue and he now has a younger son, which he never had. In part three, he apparently returns to his original time band, as his wife tells him he has no younger son, but yet is truck is not blue? In part three, the sexy female lead, (A MUST HAVE IN ALL FILMS) sits down to have dinner with her mother, who she never knew as in her reality, as she was given up for adoption. She learns her real mother's name for the first time. Eric Stoltz's character than somehow manages to reverse time, which would have prevented this mother-daughter exchange from occurring, and they then all work together to save the world. Later, the sexy female lead, still knows her mother's name, which she should not, as she learned it in a time line that did not take place, or only did for Stoltz's character. No one has mentioned these two errors, so it is possible I am incorrect. Overall, a pretty good film, but should have been edited down to a two part series.