One of the most entertaining movies I've seen all year for all the wrong reasons.
The story is simple: satellites start to fall from the sky and the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland has accidentally created a tiny black hole that is threatening Europe and a small group of children who just inexplicably happened to be visiting the place that very day. Not the worst set-up for a Roland Emmerich-type flick: a vaguely realistic set-up, over-the-top special effects, family drama in the times of catastrophe and cheesy heroism. However, "Heroes" took the competence and massive budget of the Hollywood disaster porno genre and replaced it with awful acting, a baffling script (complete with some uncomfortably patriotic lines from our dear chancellor) and a stunning lack of understanding in the fields of geography, geology, astronomy, computers, telecommunications and physics. How gravity actually works seems to elude the makers of this "film". To put it shortly: an absolute train wreck, that tries its hardest to use every cliché in the book and rip off every Roland Emmerich flick ever made but fails spectacularly.
To put it even shorter: it's glorious!
Absolutely everything in this movie is wrong, it has to be seen to be believed! I watched it with a good friend of mine, we had a couple of beers and at times laughed so hard we missed entire segments of dialog. The amount of stupid put into every vibrant piece of this masterful mosaic of awfulness is simply inspiring and might warrant a second viewing. If you are a trash-fan, this is your El Dorado. If you are a science aficionado, who loves to tear the implausibilities of popcorn movies apart, you will be kept busy and your brain might be slowly transformed into some kind of blissful yellow mush. If you just want to watch a good, entertaining movie you will be in great pain and I pity your soul.
So, in conclusion I am not sure if I should give "Heroes" 1 or 10 stars. It is a marvelously dire use for your spare two hours if you expect an actual movie, but if you can get behind a lovable trash extravaganza, like battlefield earth or plan 9 from outer space I wholeheartedly recommend it. "Heroes" is so bad it's genius. It's the best kind of bad, there's not a single boring moment and the makers clearly tried to create an epic masterpiece to celebrate the German Unification day (October 3, the date this was broadcast) which makes their incompetence all the more gratifying for adherers of Schadenfreude and connoisseurs of the fine taste of bad cinema. "Heroes" has been tailor-made from the get-go to dissolve on impact into a sad, sticky liquid of failure, for us to wallow in and die a happy pile of human goo.
My rating of 5 represents the middle of the road. My cineaste-self gave it a 1, my Ed Wood-fanboy self gave it a 10 so to speak. Choose for yourself.
