Richard Chatten But it had big shoes to fill.Gerry Anderson plainly wanted to make something supplying more bang for his buck for the big screen, but in the process seems to have forgotten that 'Thunderbirds' is about International Rescue. Remarkably less time is actually devoted to the much-loved craft every kid in the sixties wanted to own than in any random episode of the TV series. (We don't even see Thunderbird Four.)Also sorely lacking from the series is Barry Gray's terrific music; which unchanged could have really ramped up the tension. But we instead get a rather light-hearted original score from Gray which often falls unsuitably silent at the most dramatic moments.Since so little time is devoted to International Rescue themselves, the crazy dream sequence seems even more overextended than it already is; and just seems to be there because Anderson wanted something different to the TV series. (Which I was perfectly happy with as it was!)The Mars mission is an interesting idea, but the hiccups that require the intervention of the Tracy boys are disposed of surprisingly perfunctorily, and receive insufficient screen time to wrack up the tension the TV series would deliver every week in under an hour. The sequence actually set on Mars - after a journey taking just six weeks! - seems to belong in a different film. (It also looks more like the Moon than Mars, as the pictures sent back by Viking 1 ten years later confirmed.) Nobody - including the Tracys - seems bothered that our first blundering act on encountering Martians seems tantamount to an unintentional declaration of war on Mars and its inhabitants.

chrismartonuk-1 I well remember this from my childhood. It received quite a bit of hype at the time with a full colour photo story book and the story serialised in TV21. The cinema in Malton I watched it in seemed fairly well packed and I recall everyone laughing when parker respectfully took off his cap having dispatched the Hood in his getaway craft. Years later, I was surprised to hear it had flopped at the box office - especially when a sequel followed 2 years later. Looking back, I can see why. The opening of Zero X been put together seems to take forever as does the inquest afterwards. At least the otherwise lamentable live action film had the good sense to open on a rescue mission unconnected to the main storyline - Bond-like. Perhaps if the mission had been a more personal one for the Trace family - perhaps a trap set by the Hood to destroy them once and for all - it might avoid the understandable criticism of being a TV episode stretched out beyond endurance. As with the other films, the least interesting member of the Tracey family - Alan - is made the star. The Cliff Richard interlude is too obviously padding - why not go for the Beatles? Also, the small screen tends to be kinder to the often lamentable, rock-jawed dialogue than the big screen. Fro Four Feather Falls, onward, Gerry Andeson's series' functioned as small screen parodies of big screen Hollywood heroics. We even see Gordon Tracey's visible arm joins while he goes swimming in the Trace island pool. For all that, the climax with Alan hanging on for grim death to the undercarriage of Zero X shows that the Anderson's mastery of spectacle and larger-than-life action remains undiminished. Gerry should be rewarded for his unique contribution to British cultural life - as great in its way as Walt Disney's.

The_Secretive_Bus I grew up on Thunderbirds repeats as a kid. The excitement, the explosions, the majestic Barry Gray scores... It was a wonderful programme. Even now I have a great soft spot for it and own the whole series on DVD. Though the episodes now seem quite padded here and there and I watch it with much more cynicism than I did as a child, I still love it. A good episode of Thunderbirds is the perfect nostalgia trip for me.Sad to say, then, that the Thunderbirds movies retain little of the qualities that made the TV show such great fun. Perhaps it's the script: Gerry and Sylvia Anderson were far better leaving the scripting duties to other writers as they couldn't write decent dialogue for peanuts. They wrote Thunderbirds' debut episode, which has awful expository dialogue and lots of pointless sequences that go nowhere - but the episode as a whole is still a classic due to the frenetic atmosphere, the sense of doom and the fantastically imaginative rescue (it's the episode where the Fireflash plane lands on three little buggies). "Thunderbirds are Go!" is just horrendously boring. The first ten minutes are taken up with the Zero-X ship being assembled. Very slowly. Later on we have a long dream sequence where Alan imagines going out for a date with Lady Penelope, which features Cliff Richard and the gang having a sing-song (a musical segment in a Thunderbirds movie - what were they thinking?!) and the entire subplot of what the Zero-X astronauts get up to on Mars has no bearing on International Rescue at all.The Tracy brothers get hardly anything to do in their own film (John, as is customary, has about 5 lines of dialogue, and Gordon just sits about looking glum - even everybody's favourite, Virgil, has barely any screen time at all). Nor, in fact, are the Thunderbird craft used all that often. In 100 minutes of film there's only one real rescue (featuring Thunderbird 2), with IR overseeing operations at the beginning of the film - which involves them sitting around and peering contentedly at control panels. You'd think with 100 minutes - double the length of one of the TV episodes - the Andersons could've plotted loads of thrilling situations and rescues that involved all the Tracy brothers and their Thunderbird machines, but it was not to be. Thunderbirds 1 and 3 swoop about for a few seconds. Thunderbird 4 isn't even in it (despite being on the DVD cover). Nor are the pod vehicles present - couldn't we even have had the Mole drilling away at something? It really is a tedious film. And that's not even mentioning Alan Tracy ignoring his girlfriend, Tin-Tin, and fantasising about Lady P instead. Way to be a good role-model for the kiddies, Alan. Then again he was a snot in the telly series too...Maybe I'm being too hard on what is meant to be an inoffensive kids' film featuring explosions and great model work. But then again the TV show was a genuinely exciting and exhilarating programme, which, at its best, provided great entertainment. "Thunderbirds are Go!" has an uneventful plot, awful dialogue, no decent set-pieces, and - the cardinal sin - a boring rescue that doesn't even utilise the Thunderbird craft to the best of their abilities. It's difficult to imagine kids being wowed by it. You'd be far better off going back to the telly series. Show your kids the Fireflash episodes, or that brill one where giant alligators attacked a manor house. Heck, show them the daft one where Parker encouraged everybody to play bingo for half an hour. Both younger viewers and adults looking for warm nostalgia will be disappointed with "Thunderbirds are Go!" Avoid.

junk-monkey I was about 6 when this film came out and I remember a friend of mine having a "Zero X". I was so jealous. It was the sexiest thing I had ever seen (long before I knew what sex was or what 'sexy' meant).I never saw the film at the time and when my wife bought me a DVD copy at a garage sale I was awash with nostalgia. A feeling of warm happiness that lasted for at least 7 minutes into the film... my god, it's boring! After a while the only entertainment value I could drag out of this stupendously dull, overpadded TV episode was spotting new ways the filmmakers avoided having to have their characters walk anywhere. During the TV shows walking was suggested by having the character puppets jog up and down as they moved forward. Fine within the limited frame of a TV screen (especially the scritty little things we peered at back then) but a similar motion on the big screen would, at best, look ludicrous and, at worst, induce motion sickness. In a film where supersonic aircraft stay rigidly in the centre of the frame having the "actors" bounce around like ping pong balls causing pre-teen movie goers to vomit over their neighbours would be distressing.