I saw this film this week and since there is no comment yet I'll have the honor ;) I don't want to go into detail and tell or analyse the story right now but I want to say that it's really outrageous. I haven't read the book to it yet I must confess but my friend did and she said that the movie is somewhat different, which is quite logical. I think that they really made the best out of the story, the book was basically about a catastrophe and the life before and after an atomic accident. I give away that there is a love-story that wasn't obvious in the book but it is not like in other book-picturisations a public-lure, it is just a wonderfully insight-giving thread. I liked it that the film does not rush through things, it's not that you feel after fife minutes like "okay that was the life before it now" and then "ooh yeah the accident, now there's gonna be action". Far from it. It starts like a great movie about common characters, life, family, love, youth .. and the film manages to keep your attention but it does not lead you into a romantic ideal-world-feeling that crashes when the alarm rings, it just is realistic, to sum it up. And all in all it really keeps your attention, your interest and your emotions, it gives room for emotions and thoughts about the meaning of love, of life, existence and death at the same time and there's not a sweet beginning, a total clue of action, sadness and shock with an abrupt ending, it has this sweet expectation that again and again there's something worse to come up that leaves you sitting small but gracefully and caring but not unnecessarily crying in the cinema-chair. The actors did a great job, all of them, above all the quite young main characters. To put it in a nutshell: go and experience that experience, but do it aware and on a day your nerves are strong, with someone you can look at in moving moments where words wouldn't do but loneliness would turn the effect in another direction, don't "just go to the movies" because this is not "just a film". every blessing /eicberin/
