I'm convinced that many of the favorable reviews here are planted by the producers, or written by very imperceptive people.
Other reviewers have actually posited that the only people who would dislike this movie would be those with a limited understanding of film - those who would reject anything that's not a conventional, run-of-the-mill Hollywood movie, lacking the intellectual yearning for movies with insight into society and the human condition.
That's a ridiculous assertion. I'm all for avant-garde, inaccessible films. And I like "deep" stuff that insists on showing the underbelly of humanity that some people would want to deny. To put this movie in that league is ludicrous. It's terrible.
Okay, telling multiple, eventually overlapping stories with pseudo-surveillance camera footage is an idea that has some potential. But this movie is very poorly conceived and executed. Not a single scene is convincing as actual surveillance camera footage. Not one. The main characters are all too conveniently visible, at the center of the shot (as if there were a director filming ...), at all times.
Not only that ... the stories rely on dialogue! DIALOGUE!!! Are you kidding me?! I'm pretty sure most - possibly ALL - of the surveillance cameras represented in the film would not record audio. Yet every word spoken by the main characters is crystal clear ... including when the surveillance camera is recording them from a considerable distance, such as in a parking lot or food court, where a number of other people are, but for some reason, the camera doesn't pick up a peep from them, but somehow zeroes in on whatever the leads utter. And when we cut between cameras during the same scene, the audio is uninterrupted. The dialogue is always at the front of the mix. You know, like a movie, in which everything seen and heard is placed intentionally. This film's creators were either clueless, or banking on a clueless audience.
To do this right, it would have had to lack audio, and show only small pieces of events, making it hard to see what's going on at select moments, telling the story by implying it. The data markers could be dropped from the movie that was made, and it would basically play out like a low budget, schlocky student film. The whole "Oooooo, Big Brother is watching" conceit is pretty extraneous to the actual film, and comes off as an afterthought. All of the stories (a teacher having sex with a student, a cop getting killed at a traffic stop, a little girl getting abducted) are nothing more than juicy smut that play to our base nature in the same way certain prime-time TV dramas do. This movie has nothing to say, but acts like it does in a half-***ed way by tacking on as the opening some text reporting some data about the number of surveillance cameras in the country or on the planet or whatever.
Other reviewers have actually posited that the only people who would dislike this movie would be those with a limited understanding of film - those who would reject anything that's not a conventional, run-of-the-mill Hollywood movie, lacking the intellectual yearning for movies with insight into society and the human condition.
That's a ridiculous assertion. I'm all for avant-garde, inaccessible films. And I like "deep" stuff that insists on showing the underbelly of humanity that some people would want to deny. To put this movie in that league is ludicrous. It's terrible.
Okay, telling multiple, eventually overlapping stories with pseudo-surveillance camera footage is an idea that has some potential. But this movie is very poorly conceived and executed. Not a single scene is convincing as actual surveillance camera footage. Not one. The main characters are all too conveniently visible, at the center of the shot (as if there were a director filming ...), at all times.
Not only that ... the stories rely on dialogue! DIALOGUE!!! Are you kidding me?! I'm pretty sure most - possibly ALL - of the surveillance cameras represented in the film would not record audio. Yet every word spoken by the main characters is crystal clear ... including when the surveillance camera is recording them from a considerable distance, such as in a parking lot or food court, where a number of other people are, but for some reason, the camera doesn't pick up a peep from them, but somehow zeroes in on whatever the leads utter. And when we cut between cameras during the same scene, the audio is uninterrupted. The dialogue is always at the front of the mix. You know, like a movie, in which everything seen and heard is placed intentionally. This film's creators were either clueless, or banking on a clueless audience.
To do this right, it would have had to lack audio, and show only small pieces of events, making it hard to see what's going on at select moments, telling the story by implying it. The data markers could be dropped from the movie that was made, and it would basically play out like a low budget, schlocky student film. The whole "Oooooo, Big Brother is watching" conceit is pretty extraneous to the actual film, and comes off as an afterthought. All of the stories (a teacher having sex with a student, a cop getting killed at a traffic stop, a little girl getting abducted) are nothing more than juicy smut that play to our base nature in the same way certain prime-time TV dramas do. This movie has nothing to say, but acts like it does in a half-***ed way by tacking on as the opening some text reporting some data about the number of surveillance cameras in the country or on the planet or whatever.