Phonearl Good start, but then it gets ruined

Inadvands Boring, over-political, tech fuzed mess

Ketrivie It isn't all that great, actually. Really cheesy and very predicable of how certain scenes are gonna turn play out. However, I guess that's the charm of it all, because I would consider this one of my guilty pleasures.

Cassandra Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

Coventry After watching a movie, I always like to take a moment to contemplate about what I've learned from my viewing. "The Hive" taught me that if ants would ever grow self-aware of their capacities and become more organized, the human race wouldn't stand a chance for survival. That is of course the case for every insect species on this planet, if you think about it. Well, except maybe for ladybugs, because what are they going to do? Cute us to death? "The Hive" is an almost entirely computer engineered and made-for-TV creature feature about killer ants, so you know to keep your expectations rather low. On a slightly more positive note, the plot here is most similar to the underrated 70's Sci-Fi/horror gem "Phase IV", and that just happens to be the best killer ant movie ever accomplished. That particular gem also presented the hypothesis that ants, suddenly and without apparent reason, began to control and develop their intelligence with disastrous consequences for mankind. In sheer contrast to "Phase IV", however, "The Hive" lacks any sense of subtlety and plausibility. There were the 70's movie was thought-provoking and genuinely disturbing, the development of the ants in this movie is just ludicrous and exaggeratedly blown out of proportions. Set in rural Thailand, an entire region is suddenly overrun by an enormous and aggressive colony of millions and millions of ants – even different subspecies are combining their forces – that in a very short time span devour harvests, cattle and even poor villagers. The ants structure their mobility, plan their attacks, learn to set death traps and even send a spy into the brain of a hired exterminator. Later on, they even build some sort of central computer entirely out of ants and generate their own electricity. How brilliant is that? The government hires the world famous Thorax extermination team. They wear cool outfits, drive in macho hummers and use highly advanced bazookas that disintegrate a couple of hundred ants at once. This still isn't efficient enough, though, so the team leader has to go to the ants' headquarters in an island cave and "negotiate" with them. Yes, that's exactly how retarded this movie is. But hey, no further complaints from my side regarding the film's entertainment factor. Any dumb horror movie that opens with a sequence in which a mother and her three-month old infant are savagely eaten by insects is guaranteed to enjoy my full attention. "The Hive" suffers from too many boring sequences and an overload of wannabe intellectual dialogs, but the ants attacks are campy good fun. Additional warning: don't sit around and wait to see the seemingly cute girl with the impressive rack that is illustrated on the DVD cover. She doesn't appear and the film and, in fact, it doesn't contain any sleaze or nudity whatsoever. Bummer!

NavyOrion I've liked movies about rampaging army ants ever since seeing Charleston Heston chewing the scenery in 1954's "The Naked Jungle." So I knew I'd have to check out "The Hive" on Sci-Fi (or SyFy, whatever they are this week.) This being the Sci Fi channel, I knew not to expect much in the way of special effects, and was not disappointed. The effects were, as usual, terrible, and the acting was only a small step better. Kal Weber stars as a cut-rate Keanu Reeves, Eizabeth Healey is annoying as the inevitable too-earnest scientist / love interest, and Tom Wopat of "The Dukes of Hazard," now so grizzled that he was completely unrecognizable, twitches and jerks as the world's most macho exterminator.But as I said, all that was to be expected of a Sci-Fi original; if you can't take that, you need to look elsewhere on a Saturday night, because bad acting and effects are a given on that network's home-grown films.Where "The Hive" improves over most of their flicks was in the story. The idea of an ants as individual cells in a larger brain, so that the colony can become self-aware and even sentient, is pretty novel, and was fairly well-handled. This revelation followed closely on the discovery that the ants had developed new physical tricks like working together to form huge tentacles. These tentacles could have been overdone (and later were) but were very effective in a couple of surprisingly subdued scenes; a field of writhing giant ant tentacles (which might have been expected to attack but instead were shown just looming ominously) was satisfyingly creepy. Coupled with a pretty cool ant-zapping ray gun, fairly plausible environmental suits for the exterminator / special forces team, and some good location shots and it's enough to keep me watching (if there's nothing better on.) Now, the gripes. First off, while bees come in hives, ants form colonies, so the whole title is wrong. Secondly, people who use the words "telemetry" and "species" in daily life would likely know how to pronounce them, not as "teleMETry" or "spee-shees." The subplot of Bill (Wopat) having an ant in his ear biting down every now and then to access his nervous system seemed to be forgotten; after all the foreshadowing I kept expecting the ants to exercise some kind of control, but the only effect was for Bill to drop into an occasional stupor or jerk like a dog with a shock collar, both of which were well within Wopat's acting abilities. The native Thai extras (only a little less talented than the main cast) were used in two ways: to walk past the camera or to run in terror past the camera. In both cases they looked mainly bored, and a little embarrassed.Finally (and worst of all) the writers seemed in the end to not know what to do with their promising storyline. The gradual revelation of the ants' physical and mental abilities was pretty effectively done (and who could have resisted having the ants form a giant ant that stamps on a human?) but the ant-based computer pushed the limits of even my generous tolerance for BS. The final reveal (that the whole thing was caused by aliens) was just a let-down.Overall, "The Hive" isn't great cinema, but it's worth a look, if just for the schlock factor. It's definitely one of the better of the Sci-Fi originals (talk about a low standard!) Keep your expectations realistic, and you won't be too disappointed.

dbborroughs Scifi channel TV movie is pretty good for films of this sort. Its the story of a hive of rampaging ants in the South American Jungle and the team of scientists that go to fight them. Naked Jungle its not with high Tech suits and weapons, not to mention a "twist" behind the attacks. Sure its filled with lots of CGI, but its handled better than most films of this sort. Just serious enough to keep it from falling into bad parody and to keep you interested. Utterly enjoyable in the brain dead sit on the couch on a rainy afternoon sort of way...or in my case on in the background as I clean my room.Worth a bucket of popcorn and a soda.

lum_nicole I do not dare to call myself a film critic but I think I do know how to appreciate a good film and differentiate between a good movie and a bad one. And in my opinion, this is a rather bad one, given the technology in film-making of 2008.Honestly, when I play the movie, I thought it was made in the 1980s. The whole texture of the film just looks cheap and unpolished. Even if it's done on a low-budget, I assumed given the abundance of hi-tech equipment and all today, there should be at least some quality to making this film (apparently I was wrong). None of the characters look good(except for the lead actor who look like Keanu Reeves at times)and frankly, I would not turn my head to have another look at them if they passed me by on the streets.The plot is ridiculous and the twist at the end of the movie just made me deemed this film as stupid rather than pleasantly surprising. The CGI is really really bad and childish. And to be called a sci-fi movie, the special effects should be the most basic component that the film-makers should invest money in. I would probably had felt better if it was seriously just a plain good horror movie about man-eating ants destroying things and end up being destroyed by humans. This, to me is more convincing than telling me that the ants are controlled by aliens. I am utterly disappointed in this movie and though I do not deny the fact this movie has the potential to be good, it failed badly this time as I do not see the effort in the film-making process.