Sam Wight

VIP

2

Watching this movie was like trying to deepthroat a firehose. An unenjoyable experience that only got worse as the movie went on.

I had to stop watching because the amount of stuff happening with the plot made it utterly unenjoyable to watch. There is no breathing room for you to process anything or to feel anything. There is just plot. This results in the characters being completely flat, emotionally impactful moments being made completely dull, and moments where I was supposed to feel shock or excitement feeling the same as the rest of the movie. I felt like someone took my brain out of my skull and ran sandpaper all over it. And by the time I was like "surely the movie's done", I was only an hour in. So I DNF-ed it.

Some might say that the pacing was a stylistic choice, to make you feel like how the Joker feels. Other more enlightened people who know what decent movies look like (and have a functioning brain) would say that this is just poor writing and editing.

Good writing and editing requires making difficult decisions about what to keep out of a movie. Movies are not books. They are 1-3 hours long, and there's a limit on the amount of content you can fit into that. You need to not only hit all the important plot points, but also leave space for your audience to be able to process things and make things emotionally impactful. Good writing and editing necessitates making clever sacrifices to maintain that delicate balance.

Nolan just straight up refuses to do this lol. I'm sure there's fans that are going to be like "there's deleted scenes! He cut some stuff out!" But at the same time, there is no breathing room in this story. It is just plot. And that's the sign of piss-poor editing and writing, which is really sad.

This movie had a lot of potential. It earns a point more than Oppenheimer for me, which was one of the most excruciatingly boring experiences I've ever had in a theater. But where Oppenheimer was completely devoid of content, meaning, or depth, this movie has too much of it.

And that to me (so far) seems to be Nolan's schtick. He's really good at making movies that seem to be good movies on the surface, but are missing one or more of the elements that make them amazing movies. You might get dazzling visuals, but no substance. You might get an amazing plot, but no breathing room or emotional depth to the movie. And because these missing elements are so critical to the movie's success, because they are the foundation upon which all the other parts rest, when they're not there, the entire movie collapses in on itself.

For that, this movie gets a 4/10. From my rating criteria:

"A movie which was so unengaging and underwhelming it in its overall effect, to the extent that you're finding it difficult to fight the urge to want to stop watching. Lethargic and emotionally numbing."

That about sums this up for me. Disappointing to say the least.

4/10. As per my movie rating scale:

"A movie which was so unengaging and underwhelming it in its overall effect, to the extent that you're finding it difficult to fight the urge to want to stop watching. Lethargic and emotionally numbing."

I was surprised that something rated so highly by others was something I just did not connect with or enjoy. Key factors for me that made it unenjoyable:

• The movie has extraordinarily slow pacing. The main point of interesting conflict occurs an hour and a half into the movie. By the last 40 minutes of the movie I was struggling to pay attention and was double speeding the movie just to see if there was anything that salvaged this movie for me.
• Some well-written characters, but also some not. Even though I agree with the movie's message that cops are pigs (I'm a literal prison abolitionist), I found the warden character unengaging and flat. His motivations make no sense, and the change from 'weird Christian person who seems fine' to 'outright disgusting human being' occurs at the drop of a hat. It's just poor writing.
• The twist was not that good and was something you could've seen a mile away lol. It felt incredibly stereotypical and like I've seen it everywhere, but that might be because I'm 24 and grew up watching cartoons or shows whose cliche was based on this? Idk. Underwhelming. Also kinda feels unrealistic to me lol.
• I do not like Huckleberry Finn-style movies. I cannot stand when a movie is a slow-paced collection of feel-good events with no relation or connection. That is what this movie feels like. It's like "Oh this dude goes to prison, he figures out some stuff, but nothing remotely interesting happens until the big conflict at the climax of the movie three fourths of the way to the end."
• I think it's great that this movie humanizes incarcerated people. I just don't think that increases my enjoyment of anything or makes this a good movie. Even though that may have been revolutionary for the time, there are plenty of other movies or books that are just as humanizing as this while offering an engaging plot and believable characters.
• I did not connect with this movie. I'm a 24 year old queer person. This movie feels like it was made for straight men. Idk how else to say it, it just feels really basic in the way straight film bros really like.

Overall I found it dull and overdone. Once a movie starts showing cracks, or once I start to dislike it, I cannot come back around to it. The slowness of the plot really got to me. That and the cliched plot really did it in. This movie could've easily had an hour cut and it would've been a ton more entertaining. For me though, it just didn't connect and frustrated me.

This is the most amazing movie I have ever seen. This is art. This movie will become minimum 10% of my personality from today until the day I die. I walked out of the movie theater a changed man. Some of my favorite moments from the movie:

Dakota Johnson starts off the movie by stealing a taxi. Nobody questions this. She spends the entire movie driving this stolen taxi. She removes the license plates from the taxi to apparently make it more inconspicuous (???). She crashes the taxi into a diner, completely ruining it. She still drives the taxi. No character questions this at all. This has become her car. She then randomly decides to go to PERU (????). She drives the taxi to the airport. Then she drives back home in the taxi. This implies that she parks the stolen taxi, which is beat up, busted, and has no license plates, at the airport for at least a week with nobody asking questions.

Dakota Johnson's sole superpower in this movie is vehicular manslaughter. I am not kidding. The main way she deals with the bad guy is by crashing a big vehicle into him unexpectedly. Not once, but twice in the movie. Also, this bad guy can see the future. And it still happens. Incredible.

This movie is sponsored by Pepsi. Dakota Johnson spends five minutes of the movie trying (and failing) to open the most blue, unblemished can of Pepsi I have ever seen in my life. Five minutes she is just holding this thing, rubbing it, stroking it like a genie, pulling the tab, tapping it. She never opens it.

Also, the villain is defeated when the gigantic neon letter P from the logo on the exploding Pepsi-Co factory falls on him and squishes him to death.

There is not a single line in this movie spoken by the villain that was not ADRed. It's fantastic. He sounds exactly like Tommy Wiseau.

During a dramatic flashback in the movie, we watch Dakota Johnson's mother find out that her child was going to have a disability. But in case any of the viewers are too dull to interpret the literal dialogue that she is saying correctly, Dakota Johnson is providing CONSTANT dialogue in addition to this explaining to the dull viewers exactly what's going on. "But I don't have muscular distrophy..." "So THAT'S why you went to find the spiders." And my personal favorite, "You did it..." The way Dakota Johnson says "You did it" is seared into my brain and will be forever how I say those words from now on. They are just too fucking funny.

Dakota Johnson uses the taxi from earlier to kidnap a bunch of teenagers and decides to leave them in the forest for hours. The teenagers literally say "Maybe you shouldn't be leaving us in a forest like this?" and Dakota is just like "No stay right there, byeeee" and then goes back to NYC in the stolen taxi and cries with her cat about her mom and spiders. Then she gets mad when the teenagers go to a diner to get food because she also left them in the forest without anything to eat and without any way to contact her. In fact the moment a teenager mentioned a cell phone, she immediately threw the cell phone out the window without asking any questions.

This movie is OBSESSED with letting you know that it takes place in the 2000s. Britney Spears' 'Toxic' plays on the radio and the DJ is like "This song is going to be a HUGE hit!" Dakota parks her stolen taxi in front of a Dangerously In Love billboard. Dakota spends 120 seconds anxiously listening to a voicemail message on her ancient home phone to progress the plot.

Dakota Johnson falls into the river and gets hit in the eye with a firecracker (exploding Pepsi factory) and is blinded after she defeats the villain. The girls she's taking care of have to pull her out of the river and perform CPR on her. This exact sequence of events (minus the blinding) happens earlier in the movie.

Dakota Johnson then goes to the hospital. Nurse asks "Oh, is everyone here family?" Dakota Johnson says (with the sappiest smile ever, and with a ridiculous bandage covering her eyes) "Yes, they're mine" and "I have everything I need right here" (blegh)

Then the last five minutes of this movie are the most hilarious five minutes I've ever seen in cinema ever. Everyone in the theater was cackling. I was almost crying from laughter.

Dakota Johnson has the fugliest and most ridiculous pair of sunglasses I have ever seen in my life. There is also this ugly fucking SPIDERWEB WINDOW that apparently got added to her apartment that it is never explained how it got there. Also, SHE IS IN A WHEELCHAIR!!!! Girl is just blind!!!!!! WHY IS SHE IN A WHEELCHAIR????

Well the girls she's watching get back home. Then she does the slowest, funniest, most dramatic and comedic turn around in the wheelchair to face them I have ever seen. And the sunglasses just make it so much worse. By her smile alone you can tell she is finished with this movie and wants her paycheck so she can get the fuck out. Hilarious.

Absolutely the most incredible thing I have ever seen.

This movie was possibly the most bland and boring thing I've seen this year. The main reason for that is the marketing that sells this as a 'biting satire'. It's not that. There is no satire in this movie, other than one character writing a satirical novel. That does not make the movie satirical. At most this movie is a boring melodramatic family dramedy, with comedy that feels like it's written for my grandparents. And that's fine! But don't sell your movie as a satire when it's not.

I sincerely fail to understand why this movie is getting all the acclaim and praise that it's gotten. All of the white critics on Rotten Tomatoes are fucking fawning over this thing, praising it for being 'witty', 'cerebral', and 'sharp'. It is objectively not any of those things! The most that this movie has to say is "Wow! Black people are a diverse group of people and they deserve that representation on screen, not the racial stereotypes our media contains." And that's a very good message! I fullheartedly agree with that! But that is also not a 'witty', 'cerebral', or 'sharp' message! It's not presented in an interesting way, and the writer and director have absolutely nothing interesting to say about it. The most they do is say "Haha look! A black man is profiting off of a book with false racial stereotypes that he made, and white people love it! Isn't that funny?" And like yeah that's a bit funny, but it gets tiring and old when that is the only fucking thing said in the entire movie. It gets old.

And again, I wholeheartedly agree with this message. I think it's great! I think that this kind of representation on screen is great and we need more of it. I understand that this content wasn't meant for me, and that other people like it more than me. But you cannot praise a movie for 'destroying racial stereotypes in media' when it has absolutely not fucking done that! You cannot praise it for its commentary when its commentary consists of a single note played over and over the entire movie! The movie does what has already been done before. The drama is boring and slow. The acting is incredibly subdued and just... okay. The comedy is written by people in their 60's. And it has no substance, nothing for you to learn, nothing for you to come away from the movie changed and be like "Wow, that felt worth my time!"

The movie's a Hallmark movie, point blank. And to see it getting promoted as an 'Oscars dark horse' makes me fucking angry when there are so many more movies this year that are worth your time and that don't squander the millions of dollars put into them on something with no style, no substance, and no purpose.

If the trailer is more interesting than your movie, you have a problem.

Skip this, wait till it comes out on a streaming service and then watch it, if you can.

[Edit] THIS MOVIE IS 3 HOURS LONG???? THREE HOURS???? Dear god one hour felt like an ETERNITY in the theater.

Unfortunately walked out because I got overstimulated cause it was a lot louder than expected, and also really fucking boring.

Visually stunning movie. Absolutely gorgeous. The effects done in camera, the cinematography, the acting, everything is just so much fun to look at. Christopher Nolan knows how to make a damn good looking movie. Hats off to the team that made this thing.

But writing wise... damn, it underperformed.

Other commenters mentioned that this feels like a Wikipedia entry or a montage of 60 second clips, and damn they are right. The writing just did. not. hit. It was hard to follow any of Oppenheimer's personal life and to actually feel anything for him or any of the people in his life. I don't expect a movie to hold my hand. But I do expect pace to be managed well and to have a bit of breathing room to be able to process stuff. This did not give you the time to do it lmao.

Also the characters just... didn't interact in an engaging way. Less than 20 minutes into the movie I was already checking my watch to see how much more of this I had to sit through! I didn't know half of the characters' names, or half of their relationships to each other, or why they were even relevant. Like the best example of this is Oppy and Einstein's interactions. They have beef, but it's hard to understand why? There's like... two interactions before the one hour mark that total less than a minute of on-screen time together. Einstein gets a few words in there and it's just very very unclear why they hate each other, or how they met, or what any of their background is. It's confusing!

Also let's talk about Oppenheimer's motivations. As a literal communist, I should empathize with Oppy and understand where he's coming from. But I don't! Because he's a fucking idiot! When he's talking with other leftists, he mentions "Isn't ownership theft?" and the person in the communist party is like "It's property, actually" and he's like "Well sorry I read all three volumes of Capital in original German" and he's like... just a dick??? But also no fucking leftist who is going around having read all three volumes of Capital talks about that shit! That's just dumb! And the entirety of his leftist politics are portrayed in a way that make him look like an egotistical maniac with dumb politics! One minute he's starting a union and pro-labor, another minute he's dropping all of that in order to be a dog of the US government! There's obviously an enormous jump happening there. Like something very, very clearly and very, very majorly changed for Oppenheimer there, and the film spends a grand total of 30 seconds in a single scene having him transition from brilliant labor activist to US government dog.

Also there are time jumps! Lots of them! The choice to jump back and forth between the McCarthyist interrogations of Oppenheimer and the past do. not. make. sense. They are hard to follow, extraordinarily boring, and absolutely ruin any sort of pacing the movie might have! There are several points in this movie where Oppenheimer starts to be fleshed out a bit more as a character or starts to be given more space for us to see what he's really like. And then it's randomly cut off and flashed forward to these utterly irrelevant black-and-white interviews. Oppenheimer has a leftist past! Of course he does! The movie literally shows us that! And instead of just telling things in a regular narrative way, the movie splits things up confusingly for absolutely no good fucking reason, and ends up showing us and telling us the same information twice! That is shit writing! If you cut all of these scenes you would be missing nothing from the movie, and you'd have more time to actually tell us about the characters, instead of them feeling like one-dimensional caricatures.

I don't know any of Oppenheimer's history, and I left this not understanding any more of it! I left after an hour because it felt like two and a half because it was just this firehose of information. And Nolan didn't present it in a way that actually made a story! He just shat this all out on the screen (and it's a beautiful shit, don't get me wrong!!), and expected the audience to love it! His characters are one-dimensional, they aren't given the space, the motivations, or the background really for us to understand where they're coming from or why they do what they do. And that ends up with this being a visually stunning but really fucking boring movie that I just walked out of because I couldn't take it anymore lol.

I cannot stand seeing visually gorgeous movies produced by people who clearly have god-level talent that seem to have a complete and utter inability to get the basics of movie-making, story, correct! I have ADHD. For a lot of people, sitting through a boring movie is just boring. For me, it is exhausting. It is excruciating. I can't fidget in a movie theater, I can't move, I can't pause the movie and come back later when I'm feeling more focused. And so if a movie is boring, I just leave! And it is so fucking annoying to miss out on a chance to see a movie that is, outside of its story, fucking beautiful because its director and writer couldn't do the extremely basic job of making a movie that holds people's interest and communicates things in even a slightly clear way. God what a waste.