If this film was intended to make me feel like a compulsive liar—which, perhaps, I am; it’s hard to tell what the truth actually is after seeing this film—then Steven Soderbergh succeeded brilliantly. If the point was pretty much anything else at all… well, better luck next time. Just about everything connected with the film feels like a fabrication, artificial to the core. Still, it’s likely that this frothy concoction plays exactly as Soderbergh intended from the get-go. What The Informant! doesn’t offer much of, unfortunately, is any insight into the nature of truth, or truth-telling. Unless…

What many viewers may miss is the chance the movie provides for a glimpse into our own not-too-distant cultural past. In cultures that place far less value on leisure that ours does today, children have always represented a blessing styled as “a quiver full of arrows” by the Old Testament—but not because they are merely so many little bundles of joy. For most of human history, that blessing has been very utilitarian in nature: a means to a family’s livelihood, hands to work the fields. And history is rife with examples of parents who have simply run away because they find themselves unable to cope with the pressures of feeding them.

Clyde Shelton’s rage of injustice in Law Abiding Citizen (and our reaction to it) is fueled by the sense that Clarence Darby, the primary perpetrator, isn’t getting what he deserves. On a purely secular level, I get that; but on a broader moral level, none of us get what we deserve. In fact, most of us expend a great deal of daily energy trying to find ways of circumventing our very own laws, and conceptually (read: begrudgingly) agreeing that we will “be accountable for our actions,” as Shelton wishes, only if we are caught red-handed. But when somebody does something really wrong (read: breaking those laws with which we actually agree), by God we want them to pay.

This is a much better-looking film than the original. The skating sequences—particularly the heroine’s finals-qualifying routine to Stravinksy’s “Firebird Suite”—are exquisitely moving and beautifully choreographed, and the loving photography of the winter Iowa countryside is stunning. Unfortunately, the story invests so much energy in this authenticity that Lexi’s character never really comes alive as a person—and the central conflict is established so late in the proceedings that the film’s rising action becomes rushed and perfunctory. I’m afraid that the skating ultimately trumps the characters and the story.

As much as the project wants to be hip and edgy, I just found it annoying—mostly due to the visual style, which melds a low-def video source with rough-hewn quasi-animation to produce compact video that imitates, after a fashion, comic-book art. I found myself making choices that would just conclude things quickly—and succeeded wonderfully, my own ending coming after a scant 35 minutes. Whew! I was really fearing I’d end up in the four-hour version. Those who are searching out something new for newness sake might be interested in this release; but claims that the film will change the way we think of interactive video are overstated.

As this spare and painful film charts its course through years of tribunals and appeals toward a final, grudging, capitulation of forgiveness, we might ask ourselves what good can possibly come of such unspeakably horrific peace. To paraphrase and co-opt what one of the Tutsi women asks about one of the Hutu perpetrators: Is the point to move us? To soften our hearts? Is that even possible? Reconciliation, at the purely human level, is a necessary evil; but it does not bring healing if merely human. In fact, lingering resentments over such things make the gory madness of Inglourious Basterds—or the slaughter of the Old Testament and the Crusades—look positively reasonable.

It’s not a stretch to imagine James Cameron himself as the techo-geek who finally achieves what Cromwell’s Canter does in Surrogates. If we get depressed because we can’t stay in Pandora, why not develop the technology to make that very thing possible? If reality can’t be made to work for eight billion people, why not deliver the ultimate opiate to the masses? Surrogates, of course, is the cautionary-tale response to those questions. Part of society rebels against the artificiality of it all, setting up autonomous surrogate-free zones. Sure, they’re surrounded by rubble—but as Willis’ Greer finds out once he leaves his surrogate body behind, there’s a lot of simple Eden to be found if we but consign our avatars to their proper places.

Choreography Travis Payne says that Jackson’s dancers are “the next generation to help convey his messages, and help continue his ideas; and they are soldiers, in a way.” And what are those ideas and messages? Baby dangling? Crotch grabbing? Myopic, blindered excess in service to tree-hugging environmentalism? Alleged child molestation? Well, not really. Almost all of those faults, crimes, and misdemeanors come through in the hours of material on this DVD. But what drives Jackson—as attested to both in testimonials and in Jackson’s words and behavior, and no matter how misguided his efforts may be—is love.

When young woman-of-privilege Fanny Brawne attempts to “study” poetry at Keats’ feet, she tries to understand it by dissection—as if it were a matter of construction and a collection of choices, and a matter of digesting one great work of poetry after another in order to extract what’s nourishing and move on to the next. But Keats tells her: “Poetry is like a lake, and when the poet jumps into it, his purpose is not to swim immediately to shore, but to luxuriate in the water.” And this is what Campion’s film—and Campion herself, as a cinematic poet—does with the poem “Bright Star.”

The story, at its core, is a mish-mash of many things we’ve seen before—usually done better, and often done quite recently. This time around, Dennis Quaid and Ben Foster star as a pair of hyper-sleep-drunk flight officers trying to figure out why their ship, the Elysium, seems to be suffering a reactor failure before completing its mission to colonize a new Earth-type planet. It’s like a big-budget dime-store horror cum mystery cum sci-fi potboiler—filmed by a crew suffering from indigestion and a run of really bad relationships. For those who like their sci-fi rough and grotesque, I’ve probably already said too much; for those who don’t, I need say no more.