Zenith (2010)
1/10
Blah. But much worse.
21 November 2013
Yet another case of misleading reviews. You are teased with terms like brain candy... well, like a candy, it certainly doesn't feed. Alas it doesn't even taste good. The container is as bad as the content.

Content first: Constant pontification on subjects that you will find provoking only if you were born after 2012. When the first sentence begins with "Fact:...", you instantly realise that you'll be listening to a condescending moron who thinks he will teach you something. I'm not referring to the character. Then he badly explains the Milgram Experiment, a ground-breaker, in the 1960s, and you start to think that maybe you should re-watch Verneuil's I as in Icarus, a great movie that one.

Don't go thinking that I'm bashing on the sole basis of the introduction. All along, you'll get hammered coprolitic gems like "who are you to judge if you haven't produced anything ?" (let's ask Cioran about that), "I know words no one else knows anymore" (well, we all know people who can speak 6 languages fluently but have nothing interesting to say), a USA-Great Britain one-world government (and Australia once again forgotten in that definition of global), "Pain makes them feel alive", etc. Nobody in the film crew has even realised, or dared to mention, how dumb the idea of paying for a pain-inducing drug is.

Zenith exemplifies a contemporary trend in which any brain fart can find an echo on the Internet and be proclaimed as an idea.

Container: To try to keep watching Zenith despite its early ineptitude is a true ordeal. First, the acting is atrocious. Not raw... bad. Absolutely all of it. Unbelievably incompetent. Strangely, all the actors are physically perfect for their respective parts, but none of them has any mike skill. Put the narrator on top of it for new levels of annoyance.

The camera work is of the same calibre. In every single scene, the camera is set at the worst possible place, or on a shoulder, or is a cctv sensor... It hopelessly tries to be arty, with zero flair. The lighting is equally awful, and so on. A sex scene is ugly, which is an unforgivable crime, repeated twice more. Scenes of violence are over before you realise they started; they have no impact; they are unclear, like everything else.

Using the word Independent as an excuse for incompetence is irritating. It is, in fact, an insult to independent cinema. There are masterpieces with the tiniest budgets out there. Watch Man Bites Dog, made by three students with no money (not even a university grant) using all their family members for a free cast. Brilliant. Because they have talent, unlike Mr Nikotic. Wait, I take that back: I don't need a masterpiece as an example; just watch a good independent movie, or an okay one, but don't bother watching the abysmal Zenith.
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