This feels like the rare miss in Bigelow's early work. I really liked how it looked and how it was shot, the lighting was really interesting, a lot of the colors were very sharp, but man this story was an absolute mess. Character motives seemed non-existent and everyone in the movie was an absolute idiot. Probably the most inept cops I've ever seen in a movie.
I wanted to like it for how it looked so bad, which just made me more frustrated that i hated everything the characters were doing.
I was a little confused at times, but once I realized that this was just De Palma going full "oh you think I took inspiration from Hitchcock BEFORE? wait till you see THIS!", it all clicked into place.
I'll never look at a giant industrial drill the same way again.
This is one of those movies that actually had me kind of pumped for the first 30 minutes or so. I think if it had tried to just be any one of the 3 different movies it was trying to be all at once, it could've been pretty great.
Unfortunately, it haphazardly bounced between all 3 and never really came together.
I understand why people either love or hate this movie, but Tarsem Singh is my drug and I will inject anything he makes straight into my veins. Seeing early visual ideas he would explore later in The Fall was really cool, but even the stuff outside of the dream worlds was incredibly well directed. The police raid on the house, while brief, had a great kinetic energy to it(almost reminding me of the police raid on the warehouse in Layer…
