filmboicole

I mean this honestly, truly, and the most appropriate sense of the word: whoops. Just about nothing in this film worked for me, down to the foley done in post. I have a laundry list of reasons why this film really didn't gel with me, but I'll mostly let my rating speak for itself.

Aside from one thing I just need to say: horror has a tenuous relationship with mental illness. It's a historic tie and link going back a long, long time. But what Oculus does that feels so particularly stinky to me is a similar issue that I have with every project I've seen from Flanagan: it exploits that illness after deliberately attempting to be empathetic towards it. Example: in Doctor Sleep, Dan is a recovering alcoholic. The entire story, really, is an allegory for recovering from addiction. And in that film, there's a moment where a character goes to pour himself a drink to take the edge off...and it's played as a joke. In a movie that wants you to believe it's empathetic towards addiction.

The entirety of Oculus forces one of its main characters to relive his trauma, the trauma that got him sent to a mental institution for eleven years. He's only released after he's declared healthy by his doctor. And immediately he is meant to go back through the same treatment by force only for him to end up right where he started, this time likely without any chance of ever being released. It suggests to the viewer (and particularly to those struggling with mental illness) that no matter how much time, money, and effort you pour into getting healthy you will never be able to escape that illness. You will relapse. And let me be very, very clear: that is a terrible thing to tell people.

Unexpectedly more interesting than I was anticipating, but also more of a let-down. There's an immense set-up and big questions asked that are payed off in the least satisfying way that only works to set up the rest of the franchise. Now, that said I am actually intrigued to know where the story goes from here because I legitimately was not even kind of expecting that the entire world that was ominously built in the first half would be completely thrown out by the end only suggesting that we'll never see that maze again lol.

But really, I think what was the most interesting about The Maze Runner is how I somehow knew absolutely nothing about it. The first book came out when I was 14. I had kind of moved out of young adult fiction at that point, but I had friends that were younger than me so I'm kind of shocked that I knew literally zilch about this story. I never read a page of these books, I never even saw a trailer for these films. They only popped up on my radar when my younger cousin mentioned the films to me a few years ago and then I realized that director Wes Ball also went to my alma mater. It's kind of cool, I guess, for my involvement with these stories because it means I am going in 100% blind with actually zero expectations. To me, this is just something in the vein of The Hunger Games, which admittedly, wasn't my cup of tea at the time they were coming out. So to be honest, despite the incessant franchise setup I actually found myself having a pretty good time watching The Maze Runner.

I'll go on a tangent. I grew up with Harry Potter and, like so many people in the world, they were foundational to my upbringing and my identity. They still are, to be honest. I re-read them frequently. I love them very much. But the older I get and the more I interact with young adult epics as an adult, the more I realize just how good those novels really are. We can go back on forth about them on a literary level and the artistic rigor of Rowling's prose, but what I mean here is the storytelling of the series. Rowling keyed into loss, tragedy, ambivalence of humanity, and evil really well, but did it all through an incredibly charming and whimsical lens. Central to this is Harry's characterization. He's a boy not unlike Thomas in how he begins his journey, but the arc that he goes through has a significantly more weighty piece of development. It's about self-worth. It's about overcoming adversity through strength of character and I've always linked Harry's struggles to my own struggles with depression. Thomas, although more charismatic from the get-go, doesn't feel like there's a whole lot for him to grow into. That's okay. It's not really about that in The Maze Runner, but it just makes me love the YA series of my youth that much more.

I rewatched The Rise of Skywalker the other day in honor of May the Fourth. I've been steadily rewatching the franchise (as I basically always am) and as I made my way back through it I was hit in the face with a bag of bricks with a realization: all these movies are good to varying degrees, but if you want to look at each trilogy as its own entity it becomes absolutely fascinating. The original trilogy is a fan favorite. It has two of the strongest entries of the whole deal and it gets bonus points for kicking off this absolute unit. But it also feels extraordinarily limited at times, not by technology but in an understanding for how a universe can exist. This is through no fault of the films or the talent behind them, who could have really known what Star Wars would become? I think my most nuclear take at this point, though, is that the prequel trilogy is actually lowkey the best trilogy. It's the most consistent, it builds world the best, introduced the best memes, and feels like an incredibly cohesive three film arc, particularly if you start considering Obi-Wan as protagonist and think of it as some tragic arc. Everyone sort of recognizes Revenge of the Sith as a good film, but the way all three of those films move is dynamic in a way that makes me absolutely mourn how blockbusters used to function.

And then we get to the sequel trilogy. It's definitely the most uneven of the whole lot. But in being uneven, you introduce variance. And in the case of the sequel trilogy, that means you get the highest highs (The Last Jedi is unquestionably the best entry in the entire franchise. Yes, I will explain that in another post. And no, your opinion does not supersede mine). But you also get the lowest lows: enter Rise of Skywalker.

The issue with this movie boils down to how everyone treated Episode VIII. It gave everyone cold feet on how to move forward because not only did Solo underperform at the box office, but it was also happening in the wake of the whole DC Universe thing crashing and burning which was happening alongside the Dark Universe failing to even launch. Studios were suddenly aware that their franchises, regardless of how big and produced they felt, might suck--financially and critically. And so, after all this happened and Disney also saw the shifting perspective of Trevorrow we witnessed one of the harshest pivots I've ever seen in a sequel. The Last Jedi works because of how it subverts expectation for how a second entry in a trilogy operates. So many plot threads were seemingly resolved. Luke is dead, Snoke is dead, Rey's parentage was revealed (and yes, her being nobody is much more interesting by a country mile). It set up the then theoretical Episode IX to be something entirely new because it seemed like it would be much more difficult to just be some retread of anything we'd seen before. And instead, Disney and Abrams and Kennedy seemed to get cold feet.

The Rise of Skywalker feels like two movies smashed into one. And so my biggest question becomes: if they were going to pivot this hard, why not just make two movies? You don't need to retcon anything. Just have the Skywalker Saga end not with a trilogy, but a quadrilogy. I mean, hell, even call it Rise of Skywalker Part 1 and Part 2 to keep it technically as a trilogy, a la Tarantino on Kill Bill. I doubt anyone would have really been upset they needed to go see another Star Wars movie in theaters. And it would have easily fixed the biggest issue in the finished product: the pacing.

I'm an editor. Pacing is something I'm always tracking and clocking. It's chief amongst any editor's concerns when piecing together the movie after everything is shot. And Rise of Skywalker's pacing isn't whack just because of how quickly it moves, but because of how many elements it introduces and then immediately moves on from. When Disney announced this was the end of the Skywalker Saga, I immediately assumed we'd see a long movie. I'm never really upset to have a theatrical experience like that either. And Disney themselves proved fans will turn out in droves to see long movies with Endgame, so when the runtime for Episode IX came in ten minutes shorter than Episode VIII, you could say I was confused. adding a half hour to this movie would remedy so many issues with it (although you should also excise everything Palpatine here too).

And it's weird because everyone's biggest echo was that the sequel trilogy felt so unsure of itself. And Disney had an opportunity to use everything set up in VII and VIII to prove that as absolutely false. There was a great thread running through the sequel trilogy that the old blood and old ways have a tendency to repeat the past mistakes and that rebellion and greatness can come from anyone. And they reneged on it. They had a great throughline of pushing the story out of realms we'd seen before: new lightsabers, new planet types, a side of the galaxy that had been to that point unexplored (Rose and the Codebreaker are such good characters because they are actual laypersons, two sides of just trying to see the next day). But instead we got a package where Rey's power only comes from her parentage, Kylo Ren gets a redemption because so did Vader, rogues who seem uninterested show up because they've got good hearts. And Rey just...chooses to claim Skywalker, despite being associated with both Vader and Kylo Ren?

Listen. If you look at The Rise of Skywalker in a more isolationist perspective, it's really not that bad. It's still a hell of a lot of fun and has some really great worldbuilding to it. I liked the idea of settlements. I liked seeing the aftermath of the Death Star crashing onto a planet. I liked the idea of a Sith homeworld (even though Palpatine shouldn't be there). It had a focus on adventuring that hasn't really been seen in the movies which are usually much more conflict based than exploratory. So there's things peppered throughout that seem to be less concerned with wrapping up the Skywalker Saga, and more with being a love letter to the franchise to show how much more juice it has in it. And I'm cool with all that. I think it does a good job at proving that it exists less as a series and more as a series set within an entire universe. It might put a bow on one massive story, but there's so much more to explore. It has a good mouth feel, if that makes sense.