saima-85097 The movie begins well and does keep you interested till just the end. At which point you realize that the story is totally flawed!!! There is just no way to justify the story or the murders and other happenings in the movie. The acting is OK.The filming is alright but what to do with a movie that lacks all logic!! Especially when the whole script revolves around lectures of logic and reasoning. The movie is sure to leave you disappointed,dissatisfied and somewhat disturbed if you think even a little while watching it. And anyone who disagrees should and must tell that HOW and WHY does Seldom randomly choose the fish as the 2nd symbol???Because he clearly doesn't know the third one in the sequence as evident by the blank paper and his admittance of the fact that he didn't know at that time.It's very very hard to believe that out of all the symbols in the world he chooses the fish to be the second symbol,all the while being ignorant of the existence of a sequence containing it.Plus,Seldom's ignorance of the series/sequence simply contradicts his stature as one of the math greats out there. The solutions to the murders in the movie that are offered to the viewer are simply unacceptable and unbelievable which is why this movie is a total waste of time. How could this be a book????

SnoopyStyle American student Martin (Elijah Wood) arrives at the University of Oxford looking to have his idol Prof. Arthur Seldom (William Hurt) be his thesis supervisor. He rents a room from Seldom's friend Mrs. Eagleton and her daughter Beth. The women snap at each other. Martin finds a girlfriend in Lorna. Seldom loves Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus stating that there is no absolute truth. Martin tries to impress him by disputing it but Seldom ridicules him. Podorov is a bitter fellow student rejected by Seldom. Martin and Seldom discover Mrs. Eagleton's murdered body at the same time. Martin says he received a note predicting the murder but he discarded it. Seldom supposes that a murderer is daring Seldom to solve the case. Inspector Petersen is confounded by the murder and the math puzzles.I love the whodunit aspect of the story. The addition of math, logic and even a Clue-like game are all great although the math sounds a bit gobberdygoop. It also makes the dialog more clunky than regular speech. The movie goes on a little too long and it doesn't seem to advance for a stretch in the middle. The last act is also problematic. There are no thrills and the puzzle is not something the viewer can solve. I'm often a sucker for a whodunit mystery. This one starts with an interesting setup but it doesn't have much tension or payoff. Adapting this from a novel may have missed some needed cinematic elements.

edwagreen Dreadful film pairing Elijah Wood and John Hurt as graduate student and professor, respectively caught up in a series of murders.How one would want to relate mathematical symbols in trying to solve the killings is beyond me.By the film's end, everyone is blaming everyone else for the series of murders that have occurred. The last series, a tragedy where 10 children are killed so that another who is hospitalized may leave was bizarre and most tragic. The film also tries to bring out that sometimes it is the most obvious that is true. What is obvious here is that we are subjected to some very boring lectures linking mathematics and philosophy.

aethomson For the typical products of today's college degree courses, i.e. viewers with a smattering of philosophy or mathematical theory, this would-be intellectual romp might look like durned clever stuff. For viewers with two smatterings, it's more a case of irritating pretension. However, director and scriptwriter Alex de la Iglesia has quite a lot of fun with the arcane foibles of ivory tower academia, such as the rivalry between England's Ivy League universities, Oxford and Cambridge. There's even a gratuitous parody (contributes little if anything to the plot) of the momentous occasion (June 23, 1993) when Andrew Wiles announced at Cambridge the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem that he had developed while at Princeton (Refer IMDb's "Did You Know?" above). Yeah, that's the flavour of the piece.Is anyone unfamiliar with the final proposition (#7) in Wittgenstein's "Tractatus"? Here is the Pears/McGuinness translation (and more people ought to read this sentence and heed it): "What we cannot speak about we must consign to silence." Now you know. A self-parodying John Hurt has been invited to overact the role of Arthur Seldom, an Oxford don promoting his latest book - we certainly needed another weighty tome about Wittgenstein. Martin (Elijah Wood) is a brainy nerd (girls fall for him but) who's come all the way from Arizona in the hope that Prof Seldom will condescend to supervise his PhD studies. However it doesn't look as if his degree is going to get any further than some verbal point-scoring and blackboards getting filled with incomprehensible equations. Jim Carter grumbles away, endeavouring to fill the shoes of the late John Thaw, but a charismatic Inspector Morse he ain't.Aw forget it. Enjoy the story. It's not bad. Some decent lines of dialogue are provided for some competent actors (we don't get to see enough of the splendid Anna Massey - you can guess why). There are nifty insights about the unintended consequences of our trivial actions, or for that matter our best-laid plans. You might even decide at the end that the whole thing made quite a lot of sense. There are ingenious twists, that get ingeniously untwisted and then ingeniously retwisted. What's not to like? (You may want to watch it a second time, to spot the tricks.) BTW, that fluttering butterfly deep in the Amazon jungle triggering a hurricane way out in the Atlantic is an urban myth. If this movie "The Oxford Murders" inspires you to get into chaos theory, James Gleick wrote a book about it; and the Gribbin family business (popularisation of science) has a title, "Deep Simplicity" - a lot easier to read than Wittgenstein.