How does the movie stack up? Let's start with the good points. The soundtrack was very well done and added quite a bit to the show. The voice talents include Lucy Lawless and Kiefer Sutherland. It's an hour and a half and does tell all the major plot points of the original story.

BUT. . . It gave me a headache to watch. Literally. The movie is animated, not live action, and the animation was "blurry". You could see double-lines and digital artifacts everywhere - as if whoever rendered the video had put it on a medium quality setting for some reason (my guess is to save space; the entire movie just fits on a single layer DVD, which would mean production costs would be cheaper). Even if the animation had been sharp, the quality of the animation compares to that of your average saturday morning cartoon. Again, i could live with that if the storyline were good enough. But that brings up the final point. All of the depth that made the books so good was completely lacking in the show. It was as if someone had written some cliffs notes on the book and then written the screenplay from that. It basically was like watching a book report. "The characters did this, then went here, this happened, etc ... etc..". The movie didn't draw you in, you didn't feel for the characters, the dialog was flat, and you really didn't get a sense of the epic scope that comes across in the books.

I really wanted to like this movie, but i'm afraid i can't recommend it to anyone. Thumbs DOWN. Fortunately i only paid a dollar to rent it instead of $18 to actually buy it.