Movie Review : Sliding Doors

The 1998 film Sliding Doors starring Gwyneth Paltrow is one of my favourite films of all time. It is such a unique and deep film it is criminal how it got 65% on Rotten Tomatoes. It should have gotten 95% in my opinion. It is a story about how a moment in time can alter one's destiny. The main character Helen played by the beautiful Gwyneth misses her train and that draws into two separate story lines that play out in the movie.

Why is there no Sliding Doors 2, Sliding Doors 3, 4, 5 etc? The idea of missing a train, bus, flight, ship can be made into other stories, movies and tv shows where a character ends up in two or three different storylines and different endings to a movie. The writer Peter Howitt is literally sitting on a gold mine. Or perhaps the world prefers super hero movies to well thought out and deep movies that get people thinking. If I had a billion dollars I would finance Sliding Doors 2 where a character preferably played by Amy Adams misses a flight and that changes the course of her life. Then I would finance Sliding Doors 3 where a character misses her ship and so forth and so on. It could be a never ending movie franchise.

The only thing I did not like about Sliding Doors was the ending where Helen dies in a coma. That storyline did not make any sense. Why kill her off? What was the point of her dying? If it was up to me, one storyline would have had Helen live happily ever after with James. The other storyline would have had Helen dying at the hands of Lydia, Lydia goes to jail, Gerry commits suicide. One storyline ending as a comedy and the other concluding as a tragedy.