Considering all the factors in play, this movie was EXTREMELY average. Everyone seems to be praising this movie on it's merit which begs me to ask, what did it do well? The acting was alright at best, with Brie Larson being the best. But again, being the best in an ok pile isn't saying much. The child actor was bearable at times, but let me say that a good child performance does not mean a good adult one. The score was anything but spectacular, with it being pretty cringey at times.
The movie relied solely on the audience to create an emotional impact with the character or the movie doing anything to prove why you should actually care about whats happening. The cinematography was not that good, with a variety of shots feeling bland at best. As well as this, I noticed many continuity and audio mistakes, not necessarily making this movie a technical masterpiece.
The premise should be really effective, but it just isn't really. I think its because the characters are nowhere near as developed as they should be, so every event that should make you cry (and believe me, there are many) just feels like emotional manipulation. Some of the dialogue is a little too on the nose as well. I think if the movie were given some time to breathe and if the direction was done with a slighter hand (the director needs a new cinematographer badly) with a more subtle script the story could have lead to a great movie, but as it stands it's mostly a missed opportunity.
Overall, this movie was extremely underwhelming.
9.5/10. There are times when I feel jaded as a viewer. When it seems like despite the breadth of films out there, that I know most of the tricks, to where while I can appreciate a film's achievements in sort of a detached way, when I can even be engaged and invested in something, it doesn't necessarily reach me in the way that movies did when I first started watching them. The scope of appreciation has widened, but the emotional resonance feels muted, because I can't help but see the strings.
And then a film like Room comes along.
And Jack sees the expanse of sky for the first time. And Joy hugs her parents after not seeing them for seven years. And Robert can't even look at his grandson. And Nancy tells her daughter that she's not the only one whose life was destroyed. And Joy tells her mother that if she hadn't been taught to be nice, she might never have gone with Nick. And there's a supreme, heartbreaking look of guilt on her face when a reporter asks if she should have given her son up while in captivity. And Jack walks in on his mother's suicide attempt. And Nancy hears her grandson say "I love you." And Jack sees a real live dog, and makes a real live friend, and cuts his hair to give his mother his strength.
And I wince and I laugh and I cry and I gasp at this beautiful, devastating, intimate, life-affirming film. This is why we make movies. I love popcorn films, with the fights and flashes and epic feel, and I love the big dramas, with their scope and their sense of grandness and the talent on display, and I love those classic film comedies that mix the absurd and the irreverent and the memorable into a single hilarious package. But the films like Room simultaneously so small and so personal, yet so powerful and affecting, have a special place. These are, as Robert Ebert once put it, the empathy machine that is film working at peak efficiency, taking us into the lives of people who have suffered and been unfathomably wronged, and carries us with them as they carve out a way forward.
I didn't know I wanted a film that feels like a cross between Oldboy, Life Is Beautiful, and Boyhood, and yet the elements Room shares with each--the sense of isolation, the loving way in which a parent tries to distract their child from a continuing tragedy, the slice-of-life, impressionistic depiction of a young boy's innocence--come together to form something absolutely tremendous.
That last facet of the film, the fact that it filters the entire experience through young Jack's eyes, is a stroke of brilliance. There's a matter of factness, a certain directness or even blitheness to the way children experience the world. Using Jack as the lens through which Room tells its story renders those events not only realer, but plainer, imbuing them with the unvarnished perception of childhood. The way the film is able to get into Jack's head, to allow the audience to view these horrors and steps to recovery through his eyes, is its greatest strength and most impressive achievement.
By the same token, Brie Larson as Joy deserves all the accolades she's received for her performance here. While still a prisoner, she carries herself with such an air of both utter resignation and quiet resolve, someone who's been beaten into submission but carries on with whatever she has left. And once she returns home, the guilt that consumes her, the anger that she has for the world that kept turning without her, are palpable in every moment without fading into overwroughtness.
The film can essentially be divided into those two halves. The first is the story of Jack and Joy in Room, of the way that Joy makes unbearable circumstances livable for her son, the way that she copes and shields Jack from the horror around him, and how Jack strains and struggles to understand the idea of the world beyond those four walls, to where he can, eventually, help the two of them escape. The second half is far less intense, but still endlessly intriguing and affecting. It's a quiet domestic story about how people recover from that sort of trauma, both Joy who feels the opposite of survivor's guilt and second guesses herself, and Jack who is exposed to a big scary world, the depth and breadth of which is entirely alien to him.
But throughout both halves, there is such a pure emotional truth in each moment, from the simple joys that Jack enjoys within the home he doesn't realize is a prison, to his anger and resistance at having that fantasy shattered, to Joy's dispirited but resolute attempts to keep him happy and healthy, to the realistic, painful difficulties parents and children face when rebuilding a family seven years after a tragedy, to the wonder and fear a small boy has for what lies beyond the garden gate, and the unmitigated joy at every step taken toward some cobbled-together normalcy. Room is a beautiful, heart-wrenching, intensely personal film, that takes an unflinching yet uplifting look at how people cope and come back from the worst that our world has to offer.
Review by moonkodiBlockedParentSpoilers2016-12-21T05:15:09Z
A movie with two halves.
The first part is set in the room. Starts with a bond which is pretty average. The boy is slightly annoying at times. This is the problem on relying on a child actor. He does a good job overall but sometimes I laughed when I shouldn't have. Like when he's unrolled from the carpet and shouts 'I hate you.' That was great comedic timing. Or when he says 'room isn't smelly, only when you fart.' Fine deadpan. It's and example of bad dialogue breaking the style. Wasn't exactly hard to stick to the rigid style either, it had about 3 rules. The child is also very flat as a character. He either moans or talks nonsense. He doesn't have the subtle moods of a child like sulking, tiredness or giggling etc.. but he either shouts like an angry loon, acts very scared or is ridiculously inquisitive. It's very in your face and unnatural all of the time. His imagination is never used for fun or play but for the purpose to contrast the situation time and time again. It's full of emotional setups and no natural feel.
The movie gets better as the man enters the story. The tension is good and it's more interesting to watch. It even feels more real. The first half end with an escape. It's really well made. Very emotional. A peak. I was optimistic. So far it's just about average.
Second half.
Drawn out drama with illogical emotional decisions for the sake of it. Every short scene more or less ends with something emotional happening to try and be deep. There is more to drama than an argument or something bad happening.
Character interaction is always for effect and never real. There is no realism in this movie. The flat character of the boy becomes even more flat as be enters the hollywood cliché of alien discovering the environment. Completely boring, predictable and with bad dialogue. They end by visiting the now empty room. The boy says something like 'this isn't room because it's open. ' How cheesy and dumb is that?
The ultimate chick flick.