[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.
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@samwightt me when I have a tiktok attention span: :rage::rage::angry::angry::rage::angry:
Honestly the best thing they probably did with this is having two different cuts...
None of the rooms in the sequel felt particularly exciting with the beach one being especially terrible and the solutions were not very rewarding either (constantly running after single clues as a group or solving things randomly).
I saw people mentioning a better ensemble cast but honestly it was all very stiff and Zoey became ultimately annoying with her Mary Sue stick.
The backstory also didn't really make sense to me alongside a lot of contrived elements in the movie... I hope the next part puts more effort into the rooms/puzzles again.
Also did I miss something? Like... just... go under the taxi girls? Or how about you enter the code to get out of your own game? And if you forgot - the solution is still on the glass you know? :rolling_eyes:loading replies
@sp1ti I was wondering why their shoes didn't melt - Hydrochloric Acid burns should burn right through most shoes and it should stay on the ground for a while as much as it poured.
That would also be a reason not to go under the taxi - burns the skin right off :)
Regarding the solution still on glass thing, yeah - I was wondering that also. Even if he built some measure in so that the code works only once - its unlikely that the protagonists knew when they threw him in.
Shout by JimDarko
VIP7John Krasinski has proven to have a decent level of craftsmanship behind the camera but this movie proves that he should be kept away from screenwriting.
I’m really surprised at a lot of the positive reviews because the plotting and beats in this movie are super dumb. There is a small hint at the level we are working at when we are with Krasinski on “Day 1” where we get a small peek at life before the aliens came and they make a choice to drop in an Easter egg reference to the toy spaceship that gets his child killed from the first one. It’s a seemingly innocuous little call back, foreshadow, wink, knudge, whatever, but it is a perfect example of the types of choices made in this movie. I mean not to ruin anything but essentially an alien pilots a boat in this film. Overall it just bugged me.
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@jim222001 why I said essentially. Also pretty great that a boat can just float out to this community with an alien "essentially" driving it, meanwhile a group of rapist, underground water people surrounded by boats did not find that community.
Anyone know why this episode hasn't aired yet? The episodes were monthly up until July, when everything seems to have just halted.
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@godzilladad I've just struggled through it, thought it was pretty terrible :( What did you think of it?
Shout by Mohammad Alobaidan
I had high expectations since I loved Get Out. This movie had many good funny moments. The horror part wasn't consistent. Some of it were well done, others felt rushed. I have two main issues with this movie. The first one was the pacing, the first half was super slow and the second half was rushed. SPOILERS The second issue is that the "orange clothes" people back story wasn't well explained with incoherent things like having similar children as the originals. It shouldn't have happened since biology doesn't work like that. I wish they explained it better if they had an sensible explanation. Some may say just ignore it and enjoy the movie but I can't, I need logical explaination even if it's fictional. That's what most B horror movies which I didn't expect of this movie.
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@m7md1ob How about the fact that we're meant to believe they had a copy of the whole town somehow living in that small underground corridor, with only a few beds, and they also happened to dress the same as the people above, and how did they survive on a few raw rabbits, what about medical supplies, toilets, anything humans need to live ?? And where did they eventually get all those red "uniforms" and pairs of scissors if they were "abandoned" ... and who did it? The government ? . Jesus, this movie made absolutely no goddamn sense, and they should have honestly left the whole plot a mystery up to the viewer or something, because that pathetic monologue explained nothing.
omg that was awful
And I didn't understand which holiday it represented (st patrick's maybe? because of that song at the gramophone?)
Poor Jimmi Simpson, I'm sorry Westworld isn't coming any time soon and you had to play in this to pay the billsloading replies
@gonzopersona You are disgusting.
How exactly did you jump to the conclusion that I'm pro-rape or something?
Because I only wrote that I didn't like the episode.
Also I wrote poor Jimmi Simpson not poor Peter Rake because he (the actor, NOT the character) had to lower his standards and play in this. Where did I say that I empathize with his character?
Sorry folks but this one didn't go well for Marvel. I don't even know where to start. Acting was average, more like below average. Screenplay was as much ordinary as it could be. No surprise here. CGI was OK but it's somehow expected from Marvel. But I totally didn't like the idea of Wakanda. Hidden city in the center of Africa with tons of technology and advanced weapons and systems and so on. But how the hell did they build all of that? No explanation. It just happened. Yes, they have Vibranium, but they don't sell it. In fact they never did and for whole world they are just a bunch of shepherds and farmers. So where did they take all that money to build empire like this? I don't like movies without explanations and this is one of them. Almost nothing has been told about Vibranium whatsoever. Oh yeah, it's some super thing from the universe capable of anything. That's all the explanation you get. There are too many clichés we have already seen too many times. And we have to see them again. One example: I challenge someone for a fight because I want to kill him. And when I have the chance to kill him, what would I do? Kill him or throw him down from the cliff to the water where he can survive? But enough. If you hesitate if to watch this, I can recommend not to waste your time. Wait for the Avangers where you can also see the Black Panther. You won't miss anything if you miss out this movie.
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@hlava rating is high because if I rate it anything less than 10 people will call me racist.
Denis Villenueve. A solid lineup. A different take on first contact. I loved Sicario but went in expecting a cerebral epic sci-fi.
That was a mistake.
Good things:
- Some really nice visual scenes
- Interesting aliens Calligraphy aliens!
- Clear theme of communication is omnipresent
- A neat score that might be awesome in a different movieBad things:
- The acting
- The lack of emotional reaction to ALIENS! The students asking to turn on the TV, all of the main characters
- Lack of useful characters Only the aliens and Louise actually did anything the entire movie.
- Supporting characters are very stupid in an attempt to foil the main character slightly
- Very clumsy exposition. Genre-typical news reports, voice-overs, dumb characters asking stupid questions.
- Very slow pacing. This worked in parts of Sicario, but didn't work in this movie because there was no tension. The main characters never seemed remotely threatened.
- Lousie showing up at school thinking everyone will be there after aliens arrive and there's a state of emergency
- Why can't you translate alien language like you can translate Farsi. This is a paraphrase but in the spirit of what Colonel Weber was saying.
- Useless love interest when the costars have no chemistry.
- Ultrasecure military base lets someone steal a ton of explosives and put it in an ALIEN SPACECRAFT without anyone noticing.
- Many unbelievable plot points
- Poor dialogue Let's make a baby - real quote
- Poor handling of the major plot points Looking through time seems to undermine the fact that the aliens need help. Why did one have to die if they could see the future? Why did only one die when they were right next to each other?
- Very heavy handed moral messaging that didn't align with the rest of the movie.
- Why couldn't Ian also see into the future as he studied the language, or any of the others?Overall extremely disappointing. I'm honestly surprised critics or general moviegoers like this. The premise was very good. It's a real shame the execution failed so miserably.
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If experiencing time non-linearly doesn't change anything, why do the aliens need our help in the future? At that moment they are much more advanced than humans and there's no reason to assume that we'll surpass them or have higher eventual capabilities. Other than a feeble "go humanity!" sentiment there's no possible explanation offered.
The point of non-linear timelines was about choice. The fact that she could see her daughter get a disease and die gave her a key decision: should she still have a child even if the child will die in the near future? Is the gift of those experiences worth the pain for both herself and her daughter? The entire moral of the story was that it was worth it.
I strongly disagree that determinism is the point of the movie. If that is, it's a very boring premise and explains why everyone acted so poorly throughout. What is the point of everything if it just follows a preset linear sequence of occurrences that you can't interact with? The whole point of movies is to show change, to exhibit how people/other entities react to conflict. Taking away agency undermines the whole emotional point they were making while rendering the plot completely pointless (why should the audience be invested when none of the characters can make a difference?).
Nothing did imply that seeing time non-linearly made them omnipotent. However, Louise (an extreme amateur at this point with the language) was able to see many useful, actionable things in a very short amount of time. I assume the aliens should be much more adept at receiving and using what they see.
"Lets make a baby" is a fine line if you've established a close relationship and don't want to hackily mend the gap between people that barely are interested in each other and a child they've been talking about for a while. It's such a major phrase that they don't lead up to in a reasonable way.
Ian isn't a linguist. I agree his capability should be less than Louise. However, there are all of those other screens with linguists (teams of them) from all of the other countries with a spacecraft. They are all interacting in this way and there's absolutely no indication that any of them are not experiencing this. Some of the nameless characters working with Louise in the base are also linguists, and they also play no role in important events. Louise shouldn't be special but is for some reason.
Again, the main point that we disagree on is a matter of interpretation. I prefer to think that the creators of the movie want the characters to have agency and for their actions to mean something. You prefer to think that fate plays a large role here and that seeing through time doesn't give the characters choices, only sets them on the preordained path. I don't think there's any real evidence in either direction.
However, if I'm right, the creators of this movie were clumsy and failed at creating a realistic world which is the base of serious sci-fi. If you're right, the creators of the movie gave up on the core human component that nearly all other movies rely on to motivate the characters and interest the audience. It's a lose-lose.
Shout by stormsm
If you're looking for an action and "turn brain off now" film, just don't watch it and spare us the 6-7 hearts review.
I for one, am very tired from 500$m crap like Indi Day and Marvel's poop. So I was very excited to watch this one.
This one is more like Spielberg's Encounters from the Third Kind. It's more about the characters in the film and the amazing journey they go through. It's mostly about the human behavior that will make you think.
While it's not an End of the World aliens movie like Battle: Los Angeles, it still offers great amount of military presence and plenty of stuff that's going on.
So if you actually want to care about an intelligent movie and use your head - go. Otherwise, go watch an X men.
Highly recommended for some audience 10/10.
2-feb-2017 edit: Just came out on Bluray and I saw it again. Definitely keeping my rating.
Watching again at July-2023, excited towards Dune II : Excellent. Excellent film. So called plot-holes listed here are negligible when the overall product is really thoughtful and masterfully crafted.loading replies
@stormsm jesus fuck why would you think anybody who doesn't love the movie as much as you is a dumb person or having "turned off his brain"? It seems to me that you like things that makes you think like you're smart, which this movie clearly does for you, but that kinda language is unnecessary and people are entitled to their (negative) opinions, just as much as you.
what baffles me is that there are 50 people like you, judging by the number of upvotes. God help us all.
Shout by stormsm
If you're looking for an action and "turn brain off now" film, just don't watch it and spare us the 6-7 hearts review.
I for one, am very tired from 500$m crap like Indi Day and Marvel's poop. So I was very excited to watch this one.
This one is more like Spielberg's Encounters from the Third Kind. It's more about the characters in the film and the amazing journey they go through. It's mostly about the human behavior that will make you think.
While it's not an End of the World aliens movie like Battle: Los Angeles, it still offers great amount of military presence and plenty of stuff that's going on.
So if you actually want to care about an intelligent movie and use your head - go. Otherwise, go watch an X men.
Highly recommended for some audience 10/10.
2-feb-2017 edit: Just came out on Bluray and I saw it again. Definitely keeping my rating.
Watching again at July-2023, excited towards Dune II : Excellent. Excellent film. So called plot-holes listed here are negligible when the overall product is really thoughtful and masterfully crafted.loading replies
@stormsm why is this the top rated review when it said almost nothing about the actual movie and is instead more focused on comparing it to, or streight up bashing, other movies.
