The Outsider 2018

Personal 8/10
If the technical execution and directing/acting had been average, it would've gotten a 6/10 for an enthralling, but simple story, but the technicals and directing were fantastic.

I honestly can't fathom how this got a lukewarm or worse reception. Oh wait, yes I can. It's that for any particular film, the reception and its prestige level is entirely subjective based upon entertainment and social trends, so that anything that isn't Godfather-level in every capacity can either be lauded and judged on a very fluffy sliding scale of subjectivity, or dismissed as mediocre subculture trash.

As for the actual film, the set design is amazing, the colors are gorgeous, the directing and camerawork is top notch, as is the acting, and the score is perfect. The story is straightforward, the dialog and action laconic without being sparse, and I found it entirely engrossing. I wasn't expecting much coming from Netflix, but it's without a doubt among the best films they've financed that I've seen, and by a very large margin. Since NF is so f'ing terrible at recommendations, I'll at least mention Mute here, which is thematically similar, but with a more involved plot and characters, and is the other gritty drama they made that is a head above their standard quality level.

Anyone rating this under a 6 (a six I can at least understand due to the subjectivity of any particular viewer's interests or ability to appreciate films that aren't making intra-scene cuts, a sex joke, or an explosion every 2 seconds) is just being petulant and/or pretentious. I'm beginning to think that people writing reviews of things where they claim that a character's reactions or behavior isn't realistic are just aping similar criticisms they've read and just feel they can apply it to any character that might just be a different kind of person than them. In case you hadn't noticed, Leto plays a lot of psychopaths, and people with those personality traits could easily be defined by the singular aspect of not behaving like most other people.

For my eyes, everyone behaved realistically according to their character and their circumstances. If anything, I think the film was too short, and I could have stood for more and longer scenes. But for how compressed the story was into exactly two hours, I think they made everything as natural as possible. It's quite easy to infer what a character could know, and what they would need to do in a particular scenario, and while I can't say I would have been able to do everything Leto's character did, character-wise, I'm pretty sure I would have ended up dead had I not. What I think it needed was screentime to develop Nick and Miyu's romance, and Nick's life in the organization and Kobe. Something like the international cut of Léon, which, to me, is the only proper way to watch the film.

Another criticism is lack of a backstory, or "audience anchor". In other words, the sugary pop hook chorus/family bait. I'll use this as a place to generally criticize the concept of the backstory in films of the past couple of decades, because it's a particularly weak crutch in cinematic storytelling. I grew up without a father, so it's perhaps a bit more obvious to me.

The presence of a backstory for the main character(s) is entirely unnecessary. Full stop.

In some stories, the backstory is actually tied inextricably into the core plot. In others, it's superfluous baggage.

In many (almost all recent) Hollywood films it ends up as cringey, sappy, banal dead weight weighing down the first half of a film, either forcing bad pacing later in the film because it's both rushed and too long because of it, or trying to hook you in the opening scene with a trite flashback before you even know or care about anyone. I'm glad to be rid of it here. I'm not going to care about the MC's spouse if you separate them in the first five minutes of the film. About the only exception to that I can think of is the haunting opening of 28 Weeks Later.

I don't give a shit about Nick's parents in some prairie in Wisconsin, or the girlfriend he left behind, or his misplaced in time frat-bro brothers in arms, just like I didn't give a shit about Starlord's front-loaded little boy Walkman flashback in the first Gaurdians.... Those other people have no bearing on the story, and I know they're going to be swept away after a single scene, and I resented the clumsy and saccharine attempt at emotional manipulation there, and in the beginning of Arrival, and the first time Joker shit on Phoenix's character. The second time I cared, because by that time the film had humanized the character, instead of just setting up a feels trip right off the bat.

This story is the tale of a clean slate. A stranger in a strange land with everything of his old life taken away, forced to adapt or die.