What happens after one dies?
"Fearless" tries to answer that question through its raw emotions, showing a survivor of a terrible plane crash who becomes truly and utterly fearless. Max, the survivor, reaches some type of spiritual nirvana when facing death directly, and is reborn in a way. However, he feels as if he's already dead, and he sees the rest of the survivors in the same way. This makes for an interesting character study, exploring what happens when one embraces fully both fear and death. Jeff Bridges has by far the best performance in the film, and showed much of the needed emotion to keep the movie afloat. The rest of the cast did a decent job (though I didn't like the child actors), and Tom Hulce was great in his little part as a greedy lawyer.
However, I felt the movie lacked some focus at some parts. The beginning was great, and so was the end. In the middle, I felt some ups and downs, and some scenes fell flat in contrast to some of the better scenes in the film. After the beginning, the film constantly flashed religious themes without much subtlety, but those stopped after the middle of the movie. The relationship between Max and Carla, another survivor, was interesting enough - but I didn't feel the actress playing Carla did the best job she could. The psychiatrist was rather superfluous to the story, and Max's wife was rather ignored in the first half of the film and didn't get enough depth afterwards in my opinion. The directing was interesting at times and unnoticeable in others, but it was overall solid. I think the script has the biggest issues of the movie - some of the lines were hideous in my opinion, and the plot itself felt a tad not fully organized.
To sum up, even though I found the film good, there were too many flaws in it which kept taking me out of the movie. The ongoing themes of Christianity felt rather annoying and preachy, some characters didn't contribute much to the emotional depth of the film, and some of the dialogues felt extremely fake to me. An interesting viewing, but I felt some aspects could have been handled better.
"Fearless" tries to answer that question through its raw emotions, showing a survivor of a terrible plane crash who becomes truly and utterly fearless. Max, the survivor, reaches some type of spiritual nirvana when facing death directly, and is reborn in a way. However, he feels as if he's already dead, and he sees the rest of the survivors in the same way. This makes for an interesting character study, exploring what happens when one embraces fully both fear and death. Jeff Bridges has by far the best performance in the film, and showed much of the needed emotion to keep the movie afloat. The rest of the cast did a decent job (though I didn't like the child actors), and Tom Hulce was great in his little part as a greedy lawyer.
However, I felt the movie lacked some focus at some parts. The beginning was great, and so was the end. In the middle, I felt some ups and downs, and some scenes fell flat in contrast to some of the better scenes in the film. After the beginning, the film constantly flashed religious themes without much subtlety, but those stopped after the middle of the movie. The relationship between Max and Carla, another survivor, was interesting enough - but I didn't feel the actress playing Carla did the best job she could. The psychiatrist was rather superfluous to the story, and Max's wife was rather ignored in the first half of the film and didn't get enough depth afterwards in my opinion. The directing was interesting at times and unnoticeable in others, but it was overall solid. I think the script has the biggest issues of the movie - some of the lines were hideous in my opinion, and the plot itself felt a tad not fully organized.
To sum up, even though I found the film good, there were too many flaws in it which kept taking me out of the movie. The ongoing themes of Christianity felt rather annoying and preachy, some characters didn't contribute much to the emotional depth of the film, and some of the dialogues felt extremely fake to me. An interesting viewing, but I felt some aspects could have been handled better.