Gyllenhaal is outstanding and I’ll always love Villeneuve’s direction but this is an aggressively alright film. There’s plenty of great stuff, however, none of it feels that impactful. It’s likely I’d garner a deeper appreciation for this upon another viewing, but the glaring issue is that I have no true desire to revisit this.

Biting social satire walking hand in hand with some intense brutal (albeit gloriously entertaining) violence.

I cannot possibly express my excitement to begin diving into Ingmar Bergman’s work after this. Not a single misused frame, and some really incredible moments dipped in their own extremisms of separate emotions throughout.
Brilliant stuff.

Hm. While I acknowledge I prefer the razor sharp focus that Bong brings to his Korean language films, this is a mess. Between awful campy dialogue, an all time worst Mark Ruffalo performance, one of the poorest final acts I’ve seen in years, the wilhelm scream, the faux ending, and the incessantly on the nose commentary on capitalism ~ disappointing. There are so many cool elements at play, a plethora of worthwhile ideas begging to be explored, and an exceptional Pattinson and Collette, but, all in all, the film ends up being as recyclable as its titular character.