The DVD I had rented fucked up in the last 30 minutes of the film so we couldn't finish it, but like yeah I get it.
The three leads, and the antagonist, are great actors, each bringing something unique to the screen. I know and love them all from other projects. It's very tense and impossibly scary (because I would just simply NOT do this), but yeah, just nothing groundbreaking here. Good genre fair.
Had to sit with this one a while. It's such a heartbreaking and interesting story but it's also a well-trodden theme and time period. So it's hard to say something new AND also not be exploitative and torture-porn-y. American Fiction was also nominated for Best Picture last year and was literally commenting on movies like this.
So in this film the new thing it brought to the screen was its experimental style. The first-person filming was meant to take you…
BONKERS!
Would have better with deeper dialogue and more practical effects.
No, seriously give me a fucking break. Not a single moment landed or was even allowed to breath. Everything felt like it was shot from a great distance both literally and emotionally. Characters' logic and motivations were kept deliberately obtuse, and not in a fun or shocking way. Besides Denzel Washington and that one slow-mo shot of the arrow firing (the one we didn't see impact) Gladiator II was like one long TV episode. Dune 2 had better colosseum scenes in a movie not even about that. Ridley Scott needs to retire.
