InformationRap
This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.
Juana
what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.
Jakoba
True to its essence, the characters remain on the same line and manage to entertain the viewer, each highlighting their own distinctive qualities or touches.
Roger HUSS
Collision is wound up with some satisfyingly unexpected plot resolutions (the pedophile hints are a red herring, the illicit images being pirated editions of Startrek, and the piano teacher's angry gestures, the immediate cause of the pile-up, are caused by a wasp ; the mother-in-law is killed by her son-in-law immediately AFTER the crash ; the Paul McGann figure is revealed as a serial offender but the waitress nevertheless gets to travel in his absence; the race theme, flagged up at the start, is surprisingly undeveloped, as if to say 'we're avoiding clichés here'. In the final episode the rhythmic reprises of the collision are replaced at the end by an undoing of the crash in rewind mode underlining the contingent aspect of the whole ghastly event as the frame couple, policeman and woman, move on with their relationship, implicitly okay-ed by the policeman's disabled daughter. It could have been called Accident, but Collision is a better title because more non-committal. Ultimately an elegant, feel-good, production, with excellent casting.
Steve Skafte
"Collision" is a very engaging, human type of thriller. There's a certain air of improbability to the script, however. It's not so much that there's such a wide cross-section of people represented here (that goes without saying in a country so diverse as England), it's the fact that everyone has such a complicated network of secrets and lies which are directly or indirectly exposed by the crash. The acting is mostly very, very good. Douglas Henshall makes an especially engaging leading man. He acts his character on a more personal level, feels more familiar than most police characters. He's really what makes this miniseries work.The script is really quite brilliant, in its own way. The final conclusion makes you see the big picture with a sort of completeness that makes all the preceding events come into clearer focus. Not something you could watch twice, but it's certainly worth seeing.
mar9tin
This is not a detective mystery to any great extent, but a police procedural of the type written in the hundreds by John Creasey under a variety of pseudonyms. The end is never in doubt, and indeed, is replayed over and over during the course of dozens of confusing flashbacks. Only halfway through the five hours does it dawn on the detective, assigned in a totally contrived way to the handling of a highway pileup, that something may be out of the ordinary. And indeed everyone involved is hiding something, in good red herring fashion, but the only question is whether that had anything at all to do with causing the accident. Unless you are a transportation safety board employee this is probably not for you, and the money spent on it might have been more fruitfully spent on having the producers' heads examined.
albertk1
Although I enjoyed the show, I did not understand where Tolin got the digital version of the incriminating information on the chemical company. Did anyone else catch that? Also, in retrospect, I gather from the final "what might have been" sequence, that Jane had taken an unsuccessful swat at the wasp at the beginning of the series. But that was not memorable and it would have helped if that had been included among the many flashbacks. Some other issues were unresolved: (1) Did Brian get arrested for murdering his mother-in-law? The police still wanted to see him and there were some suspicious findings regarding how he handled the car. (2) Was the head of the chemical company arrested for involvement in his employees murder or genocide in East Africa? Again there was some evidence.It seemed not only heartless, but bad policing for Tolin to have ignored the plea of the phony James Taylor. Acting on his plea could have led the police to the murderers of Karen Donnelly.
