Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy......M/TV Board Verdict?

it's pretty popular with the board. i've yet to see it, but i do plan on purchasing it when it gets down to $10 for the bluray on amazon

the original mini-series was really really good, have a hard time seeing how they condensed it all into a two hr movie. Still want to see it bc the cast is great

The Karla book trilogy is some of the best spy-fiction you'll ever find.

I liked it, but I can def see how someone would find it boring or confusing if they didn't know anything about it

It looked great, acting/cast were top notch, but it was so convoluted. I'm not afraid to admit, I was pretty lost.

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I was left wanting a little bit more

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I'd suggest watching the original mini-series LINK

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy Politics isn't business. Politics is personal and often paphian. The Donations of Alexandria was the culmination of a grudge between Mark Antony and Octavia. The subsequent battle a testament to Antony's love for Cleopatra. Iraq II was fought, at least in part, for family vengeance. Lilliput and Blefuscu are excellent examples of the pettiness and personal nature of political warfare. Political espionage is just as personal in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.

The movie does its best to be a pretentious, transcendent arthouse masterpiece. But the film is easily deconstructed, and behind it we find a flawed, smug, contextualized, and flat attempt to be a Euro spy film noir. I get it, as much as a bald, fatuous, angry, and over-the-hill votary to himself who believes that by condescending praise his intelligence is made superior to his superior. The film, as much as I enjoy independent films, is not good. Oldman is decent enough, playing the demure introvert, saving his words for daring and correct conclusions character to whom he is no stranger. His character is the only character that has any depth and his performance the only that isn't awful. Tom Hardy, however, has come on strong of late, and I look forward to following his career.

I have not read the book, nor do I plan to because this film has nothing important to add. The film is hard to follow because there are too many characters who play essential roles. There are too many names to keep track of. Even for a person of my intelligence, I found it to be an overload of information. If you miss any of it, you miss the picture. Keeping track of the plot and characters is hard enough, and I can only imagine the director did this to the audience because he hoped that we would be so focused on the instruments in the film to miss the film itself. I assume we're supposed to learn about each character, to play a game of Clue: Who is the mole? By the middle of the movie, however, I didn't care. Why? Because no character outside of Oldman's had any depth. They were all simply there. And just as the recent Conan film jumped from scene to scene as fast as LSU fans turned on Les Miles, so too does Tinker Sailor Soldier Spy jump from character to character. The result is an apathy for all of the characters. I didn't care who died. I didn't care who was a traitor and why. I didn't care.

In the climatic scene, where the mole gives his reasons for treachery, I did not care. The climax for me was entering the film and it was a steady descent from there. And thank the heavens I did not care because as we await his reasons, expecting a shocking sockdolager, we get the reasons of a college-aged flibbertigibbet. If any critic rates the film highly, it's because of prejudices because the film is atrocious. 2/10

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So for someone who is watching it with no background on the books or anything, am I going to be super lost?

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No, you can follow it, I read the book, never saw the mini series, but really liked the movie.

They just cut some stuff out.

I actually thought the board was lackluster on this.
It is a mess. Superb cast with not much going on.
Most poeple will be lost without prior knowledge.

Plus, deceptive advertising will piss some people off. The trailer makes it seem like anedge of your seat thriller when the reality is a slow moving picture.
The mini is far superior. I have zero interest on ever watching this movie again.

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So for someone who is watching it with no background on the books or anything, am I going to be super lost?

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yes, don't even waste your time.


the acting is good, but i have no clue what i even watched. it was disappointing

Was enjoyable but not as good as I hoped. The acting in it is great, the cinematography is fantastic, the editing (overall) wasn't good. As a result, the film was slow at times with no point in being slow and the end "ah-ha!" moment was pretty lame. They did a poor job of building the suspense, IMO. But it's worth seeing.

ETA: I didn't think it was all that confusing.