Best movie of this year hands down!

Excellent but underrated film

A lot of perfectly good film show their cards early, establish a unique premise and let the audience explore a topic at a leisurely pace, without much in terms of surprise. this film is not one of those films.

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

A movie that suffers from a real identity crisis. This is Nicolas Roeg's half mystic epic/half crime thriller with lots of dramatic soap opera nonsense thrown in. Gene Hackman is a prospector who strikes gold in the freezing Canadian wilderness and then lives a life with such a vengeful chip on his shoulder it leads to the destruction of everyone around him. He ends up living on a Caribbean plantation named EUREKA with an alcoholic wife and a a lot of trinkets made of gold. What points Roeg is trying to make around greed and ego are buried beneath far too many story lines and far too many characters popping in and out. Hackman is fine in a blustery role that suits him and the supporting cast includes Theresa Russell, Rutger Hauer, Ed Lauter, and Mickey Rourke. Joe Pesci is a Miami mobster looking to buy Hackman's island. Helena Kallianiotes has a great cameo as a psychic whore who sets Hackman on the road to riches and ruin. The whole film ends in the most apocalyptic ways. Completed in 1981, but barely released in the US until several years later.

The many comments about this film's third act are on the money. It's anti-climatic, poorly written and poorly acted (especially by Ms. Russell, who is great otherwise). Act Three seems like it belongs in another film. Acts One and Two are simply brilliant, and curiously enough stand up on their own as a complete film. This works in one sense because the film as a whole is way too long. Seen without the boring and pointless trial scenes "Eureka" is a tight satisfying drama. I've tested this theory and shown it to friends, stopping the tape at the moment Hackman is killed. Everyone who viewed the film this way loved it, while those that saw all three acts felt the film had great moments, but was severely flawed piece of work. Take my advice, stop watching when Hackmen dies. Yes, you could insist on seeing the whole thing to make up your own mind, but you'll miss out on the experience of seeing it for the first time and loving it completely.

A waste of time. My wife had the same opinion. It should never been released. I wonder if the actors ever looked at this picture and if they did what they though of it? The cinematography was interesting but the picture still should have stayed in the box.

Nicholas Roeg's career, which spanned the seventies with one fascinating moody, atmospheric eye-opener after another (ie "Performance", "The Man who Fell to Earth" and "Don't Look Now"), seemed to be annihilated with this release. It is such an oddity, distributers didn't release it until 1986, once Hauer and Rourke were stars. This symbollic film about what drives a man finds Hackman reaching his lifelong goal too early in life- locating a motherload of gold. 30 years later in the Miami of the fifties, he's a bored millionaire, waiting to die. Following his brutal, no nauseating murder, the focus switches over to his son-in-law (Hauer) whose state of being is reminiscent of his younger self. Hauer's plight during the home stretch is pretty intense, even though it becomes a courtroom drama. A flawed, but unforgettable film with a great cast and token Roeg-esgue sex scenes.