mokokos Our family thourougjly enjoyed it. The storyline is very creative and highly detailed. Good vs evil a movie made in the best tradition of old style Hollywood. I get it Mr. Costner. The concept of hope and then glory from oppression by the Postman is just terrific. What we believe and hold dear as Americans is portrayed here. The score is wonderful too.

chriskun-16926 This is one of those movies I can watch repeatedly. Sure it's not perfect but I give it a 10. The actor who played General Bethleham did absolutely perfect and I liked Kevin Costner very much. It's a great story that doesn't totally make sense but it's 100 times better than most movies like Star Wars the last jedi.

Leofwine_draca Kevin Costner's second post-apocalypse movie in the same number of years after WATERWORLD is a real yawner of a film, simply because the limited story does not fill three hours of screen time. An hour and a half and this might have made a decent movie, but at three hours the pacing is a crawl and the film difficult to sit through without losing interest. As an adventure, it's also seriously lacking in the kind of action these films require, and the minimal battles and fights that do exist are rather mundanely portrayed and uninteresting. Instead, it appears that Costner is interested in the moralising, the sentimentality, and the occasionally pretentious storyline about an everyday drifter who pretends to be a postman and invents a story of a new government in order to bring hope to the post-holocaust masses.It has to be said that the story is original and interesting (a rarity these days), but the endless padding and cheesy romance between Costner and Olivia Williams seriously drags things down. Costner is adequate in the role as the hero but seems unsure of himself at times, just giving vague expressions instead of acting when he has to. Instead of the clear-cut heroic roles of his past, instead he's portrayed as a pacifist and occasional coward who only fights after being hunted down by the enemy. His thunder is somewhat stolen by the superb and underrated Will Patton as the bad guy, General Bethlehem, who gives an in-depth and multi-layered performance as the intelligent villain and has a great screen presence - it's a shame this man doesn't get leading roles. Larenz Tate is also good as the young patriot, but Olivia Williams and her corny romance belongs in another film. The supporting cast is littered with the familiar faces of James Russo, Daniel von Bargen, Tom Petty, Giovanni Ribisi, and Joe Santos, but nobody gets a look in much and the only developed characters are Costner, Tate, Williams, and Patton.Without a doubt, THE POSTMAN has some great cinematography in places, especially in the sweeping vistas and magnificent landscapes it often uses as a backdrop. Yet the special effects are kept to a bare minimum, thus alienating the young thrill-seeking crowd, and after the blood-and-thunder of the likes of Mel Gibson's BRAVEHEART, audiences weren't expecting this off beat, slow-paced and preachy epic. I didn't hate it as much as some, but I did find it hard to keep up the energy of watching it in places. Probably the best aspect of the story is its originality, but this frequently means taking the tale into unsatisfying areas. Not a total failure, but that running time is a real killer for this kind of story.

debalelay Any movie based on a successful book never lives up to the book, that said, Kevin Costner never failed to convey the principles laid out in David Brin's excellent novel The Postman about social responsibility and how fragile a thing civilization is. People criticized The Postman simply because the bottom line of it is that you can't wait for someone else to solve your problems for you and that you must consider a greater good beyond yourself and in-turn take the brunt of things on oneself at times. Not a terribly exciting twist I know,but a fundamentally under-realized reality of not just this movie but life itself. When Costner's character first arrives masquerading as a postman on behalf of "The Restored United States" the people of the village bombard him with questions about "the Marines" or "the President" or other institutions in which they'd believed to which he responds by saying "we've all got to do our bit".He begins as an actor drifting from place to place and simply dons the outfit of a postman by chance, invents a back-story to support his new role and goes through the motions of delivering letters in exchange for sustenance i.e food and shelter. He has the initial luck on the way when by chance there just happens to be a letter in his stolen mail bag for someone in the village he arrives at-but not an implausible amount. From this beginning however his example inspires at first one young man who goes on to recruit his friends who now, because of Gordon, have something to believe in. This movie manages to convey a message of hope that one person can change the course of things dramatically by taking responsibility and daring to challenge established sets of values.