a_c_g_t
The premise is good, The acting is really good. As for the 1st 10 15 minutes of the film the interplay of the main characters, setting the stage was just awesome. I myself could only wish to have an entrance to a party like that! The ending however was a bit of a let down and slightly left me a bit disappointed. But the film itself is worthy o being in my limited collection.
SnoopyStyle
Dr. Eddie Jessup (William Hurt) is doing experiments in an isolation tank with Arthur Rosenberg (Bob Balaban). Emily (Blair Brown) is a young anthropology PHD candidate from Columbia who is taken with Jessup. He has conflicted feelings about his father and religion. Over seven years later, they are married with kids in San Francisco. Arthur and wife Sylvia join them to find that they're on the brink of divorce. Emily wants to stay together but Eddie is restless in his settled unimpressive academic life. He visits a Mexican native tribe and has an out-of-body experience. He returns to resume his sensory deprivation experiments with a new tank. The hallucinations are visually dynamite. This is held together by William Hurt. He has the leading man looks but also has a hidden sense of reserved madness. There is a nice steady devolution and memorable scenes of his metamorphosis.
Rotaconte90
First when I heard the title I though this was another b movie trying to treat another cheesy sci-fi story, but I was wrong. The idea is not that original or mind-blowing but it has it's own rights to stand for: the depths and the complexity of the human mind, technology evolving and a more realistic effect on hallucination and transformation. The effects are OK, it has that Lovecraft feel,suspense and decent scary scenes. The hallucination in the Indian village and the monkey state are well made, but Eddies Jessup's transformations it isn't shown completely, so I'll give that a minus. Actors are doing a decent job, specially William Hurt and Charles Haid with his attitude and all.
Roger Burke
The few films of Ken Russell I've seen are all grounded in reality as we know it (Billion Dollar Brain, Women in Love, The Music Lovers), more or less. Recently, I finally saw this film from 1980.Altered States is significant for a number of reasons: it was William Hurt's first movie; it was writer Paddy Chayefksy's last movie; and it was, arguably, Ken Russell's first attempt at fantasy. Of the three aspects, I was happy to see Hurt in his first role. Beyond that, the story and film are less than I expected from such a director.With more than a nod to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, the story concerns a behavioral scientist and academic, Eddie (Hurt), who, while testing mind altering drugs, appears to regress for a while to an ancient, primitive, human-like state – not just mentally, but also physically. What's Eddie really looking for? True love.Along the way to that goal, he marries an associate, Emily (Blair Brown) who is unable to actually live with Eddie, being occupied with her own scientific endeavors in the animal world. What's Emily really looking for? Security with a husband.Mix that together with a lot of psychological mumbo-jumbo, deep water-immersion sequences, whiz-bang special visual effects bound to please some viewers, and much screaming between scientists at times, this viewer was left, at the end, with a singular response: so what? Others, no doubt, will find deeper interpretations.In sum, this film is one for die-hard Russell fans. It's well produced and acted, for sure, but it's just plain silly, like many fantasies. I'm now trying to decide which is worse: Billion Dollar Brain or this. Let me put it this way, I guess: I don't recommend BDB at all.But I give this one only five out of ten. Recommended for fans of Russell only.June 1, 2013.
