It's 1933 Cambridge University, England. One rainy night, wild dilettante Gilda Bessé (Charlize Theron) sneaks into sincere student Guy Malyon (Stuart Townsend)'s room. She stays and they start dating. As a girl, she visited a fortune teller who could only see her 34th year. After her mother's death, she leaves England to travel the world. Guy finally catches up to her in Paris. His girlfriend surrenders and leaves. Gilda is living with mysterious beauty Mia (Penélope Cruz). They form a threesome. Idealistic Guy and Spanish Mia go to fight the fascists in Spain despite Gilda's objection. Mia is killed and Guy returns to Paris to an unforgiving Gilda. During WWII, Guy becomes a British spy while Gilda becomes the mistress to a Nazi officer.

Charlize Theron is magnetic. Stuart Townsend is not innocent enough to be Guy. To me, he needs to play up his character's sincere idealism. I imagine a nerd with glasses with his face in a book. Stuart always has a twinkle and the angry pout of a male model. I guess it was impossible to split the real-life couple apart at that time. Penélope Cruz could play with more heat. Her English may not be good enough at the time but she could let them have it with her Spanish heat. She absolutely has it in reserve but she rarely uses it in this movie. As for the story itself, it wants to be a sprawling romantic war epic. It's long enough but it could never be grand enough. It takes on this vast pulpy romance-novel-style writing but only Theron truly comes out on top. She is always bigger than the movie.

This movie had potential - a modern twist on a romantic ww2 melodrama. If only some one had given the writer a few pointers on how to write a good old yarn.

The leads are attractive - Penelope and Charlize have never looked so beautiful. They really look good in their 20s/30s costumes and hairdos. Stuart Townsend is competent and everyone's favorite Nazi Thomas Kretschmann is here.

It is quite explicit in part but not too vulgar.

Some of the sets are deliberately theatrical and sound stage looking. But if is quite attractively filmed on the whole.

The ending is the real let down. Since it was a romantic melodrama would it have been so bad to have a nice happy ending? In the end you feel you wasted your time.

I'll keep this simple -- this movie could have been great, but it wanted to be too much. It wanted to be epic, it wanted to be about friends and it wanted to be an anti-war movie and on top of that, it wanted to be about WWII and the underground work. I wanted to like this movie and while it's not impossible to watch, it is slow and plodding some times. This is a movie that really could have hit the audience hard, but it just kind of laid there instead.

We go through a long, long development of the relationship between the two main characters Charlize Theron and Stuart Townsend. This could have been story enough, but no, we have to follow them over a 10 or 15 year period and go all the way through WWII. Early on, we are introduced to Penelope Cruz who is a good friend to Theron's character. And from this we kind of slip into a pseudo-three-way that never fully develops. Then there is the Spanish Civil War that Cruz's character feels she must partake in as well as Townsend. Again, this could have been an interesting story all on its own. Finally, we get into WWII and it drags on and on and I started to lose interest in the characters and the story.

It's all just too much of a BIG story and, at the same time, not enough of a story to really hold our interest. The actors were okay, though sometimes I felt like Theron was just reading her lines. Townsend, for the most part fits the role, but other times he comes across as too modern for the time period.

There are a few twists and turns here that keep the viewer interested, but overall, its not as good as it could have been. A shorter version, about one of the many story lines could make this a really, really good film.