Just so...so bad

Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.

While it is a pity that the story wasn't told with more visual finesse, this is trivial compared to our real-world problems. It takes a good movie to put that into perspective.

One of the best and real TV version of Agatha Christie's "Ten Little Niggers" novel. There is no stupid happy end like in previous ones (except Russian TV-movie 1989.

After various disappointing adaptations of this Agatha Christie mystery, the Lifetime network finally delivered the goods and did justice to the source material. With a cast compromised of known actors like Sam Neill, Noah Taylor, Charles Dance and Miranda Richardson as well as lesser known actors like Maeve Dermody and Aidan Turner among others in one of the greatest mystery stories in literary history, tension is rife throughout with nail- biting chemistry between the actors.While every actor is terrific, the major standout is Maeve Dermody as Vera Claythorne, the most anxious member of the island-goers. Dermody does not go over the top like her predecessors instead the actress remains as subdued as possible only going into a scream queen moment once or twice. Her chemistry with Aidan Turner as Philip Lombard is more profound than the novel's allusions to their mutual attraction and also displays a firm chemistry with Miranda Richardson's Emily Brent.The script is straightforward as the miniseries follows Agatha Christie's novel nearly verbatim. Minor changes are scattered in the series like the death of Sam Neill's General MacArthur (so far this is only time the character's original name has been used in an adaptation) when he is killed by a crossbow and not bludgeoned to death like the novel, Emily Brent is actually killed with a knitting needle and not drugged like the novel (this method is more fitting considering the story's poem) and the end has a small alteration but ends the same way as the book did. If you want thrills and chills, give this miniseries a viewing and skip the previous movie incarnations.

It is never easy to transform Agatha's work to a film or video. "And then there were none" is the best among all of them, at least in my opinion. It is also the top 3 best crime novel of all time. Hence it makes even harder to put it on screen. It is coincident that I am re-reading the book while I walked into this series. So I would be able to make a parallel comparison. Fair enough to say that this series retain all the main stories of characters. In details there are some modification. For a reader of the book, it is a little bit strange while watching something that are not what it supposed to be exactly. As always, the pace of the development is quite slow in general. Maybe the director wants to create an atmosphere, but doesn't work for me. If they make it into 2 episodes, maybe it would be better.

And Then There Were None is one of my favorite novels of any genre, and was one of the first "grown-up" books I read as a kid. There have been many adaptations of it for the screen, from the solid but unspectacular 1945 black and white to the occasionally too- faithful Russian version to the absolutely dreadful 80s African safari. This, in my opinion, outshines all of them, remaining more or less faithful to the story and taking elements from the previous versions and using them to far better overall effect.The visuals are breathtaking; camera angles are brilliantly used (I particularly liked the scene of Mrs. Rogers throwing the leftover lobster carcasses over the side of a cliff), and the lighting and soundtrack give the whole production a disquieting, eerie feel to it that enhances the overall experience.The performances of the ten leads are one and all superb, particularly Anna Maxwell Martin as Mrs. Rogers, Charles Dance as Wargrave, and Toby Stephens as Armstrong. Notable among the "background players" are Rob Heaps as Hugo Hamilton and Paul Chahidi as Mister Owen's agent, Isaac Morris.And then there's the script...For the most part, Sarah Phelps' script is superb; more than any of the others, it gives the actors the most to work with in portraying the increasing mental stress and terror the characters are feeling. The cocaine party scene has become the most controversial in the production, but I feel that it works well, as the simmering tension among the characters finally explodes. Little touches here and there work very effectively, such as the role-reversal in Vera slapping an hysterical Armstrong after Rogers' murder. The antagonism between Lombard and Blore is the best I've seen in any of the adaptations, because there's a complexity to it that other adaptations lack.But if I do have nitpicks, it's that, like her predecessors, Phelps changes some of the material in ways that question whether she truly thought through those changes--specifically, the crimes which have earned each of the characters a place on the island, and the degrees of severity of those crimes which dictate the order in which the prisoners are to be executed.The biggest example is Blore's crime; instead of perjuring himself and sending an innocent man to prison, here Blore beats a young gay man to death. In the 21st century Western world, that's horrible. But as late as the 1990s, judges in the United States were jokingly asking if violence against gay men "was a crime now"; would a Victorian mind such as Mr. Owen's really view killing a "sodomite" worse than smothering an elderly woman, abandoning a servant girl, hanging an innocent man, or performing surgery drunk?All in all, however, this is a brilliantly made film, and one I intend to watch again and again for the sheer thrill of it.