I do NOT get why this movie gets so much love.
I get that it's not meant to be a historical movie. It's a revenge exploitation flick set in WWII, and the bad guys being the target of revenge here are the Nazis. I get that. At the same time, there's something so utterly morally corrupt about creating an unrealistic fantasy where badass Jews torture Nazis. It's the kind of thinking that has led to America using torture on captives: ultimate evil requires an equal response. It's so much against the ethos of the survivors of the Holocaust that it's embarrassing to watch. It's misguided revenge porn.
Ah, but if only the story that was being told was better. As it is, it's not so much a story as much as a sequence of masturbatory dialogues where Tarantino gets to feel clever about himself. People talk and talk and talk, and although there is an overlying sense of tension, it's so predictable every time it becomes tedious. There's just so many times we can watch a Nazi being passive aggressive with an undercover Jew before the shtick becomes boring, and each of these last so damn long... You get twenty whole minutes of a Nazi talking racist shit until the inevitable violence happens and Tarantino gets his money shot. We're talking porn-levels of sophistication, here, except it's about murdering evil Nazis.
It's well-directed for sure, and Christoph Waltz and Mélanie Laurent do an amazing job, but man, that script is a big pile of self-indulgent crap. And I say this as someone who loves early Tarantino.
This was... fine, I guess? I think I would have preferred more of a "Death of Stalin" treatment than outright satire, because when you see characters like the POTUS act like outright idiots, it takes away some of the bite. Although, the idea that they could have averted disaster but decided not to because there was a business opportunity was really excellent.
I thought the central moment of the "Don't Look Up" political movement, was sadly poorly executed. I think maybe because the idea was WAY too outrageous. It's one thing to hurt yourself and your country because you feel it will hurt the other side more, but it's another to, like, not look up at the sky.
Ultimately, with this film, either the satire doesn't land, or it lands with a crowd that already believes in climate change, and thus, people for whom the satire is facile. It also avoided very clearly exploring political lines (for instance, by making the POTUS some kind of female Clinton but with Trump-like nepotism) so it lost a lot of its verisimilitude by trying to not take political sides.
I don't know if there's a better way to explore this idea. Perhaps this was the best story possible for this exact idea.
I really, REALLY liked it. It does something that's at the basis of my life-long enjoyment of giant monster movies really, really well, and some of the scenes had me bouncing in my seat with joy.
That being said... It's not a movie built along the lines of a modern blockbuster, at least not entirely, and for that I think it's not gonna be a huge tentpole success. People are gonna complain about character choices or dialogues or characterization. It's much more in line with the classic Godzilla formula, and THAT it does really well.
One of the big challenges of a monster movie is always to have a good balance of "monsters fighting" and "humans talking" in a way that builds tension and action, and this one, more than almost any other Godzilla movie, and more than 2014's take, was right on. Monster fights always had clear stakes, and the puny humans buzzing around had clear objectives (even if often it was just 'try and survive in the shitstorm of the century') and felt in their place as supporting characters in the monster drama.
So, in short... If you wanna see a pure, slick action movie, go see John Wick 3. If you want some of that designer-drug concentrated dose of entertainment you expect from a tentpole, you got Endgame. But if you ever felt a thrill watching Godzilla melt the rubber face off of another giant monster, you're in for a hell of a treat.
