Reviews

Let me tell you about a terrible movie, and let me count the ways it is so awful. First let me say there is one good thing about the movie, and that is the backdrop, which is the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. But that's all this historic moment is, just a backdrop. Frankly the background could have been the Mood landing in 1969.

The point of the movie is really just to show how awesome fighting is, how tough the lead female character is. Same old story, the hero can't be beat, the hero has attained some kind of immortality. Thus the movie is one-dimensional beyond belief. And that's about all you get, except the (and I will admit this) somewhat well-done lesbian sex scene(s), though the lines between the two females are very poor. There are many scenes where the "heroine" takes on 10(?) or more men, and she always wins, and of course who cares what the body counts are? There's no character development and not much of a plot; the movie is what it is, as I already wrote. I really have to lower my opinion of some of the fine actors in the movie.

This movie is yet another example of how I/we can be fooled. Look at all the glowing reviews, high user ratings, 3 superb actors. How could this movie at least not be decent?

It isn't even decent because among the script, the concepts, every aspect of the movie, nothing works. I don't demand that a movie be great in order to like it, yet I can't think of anything redeeming about this movie. It is silly, it is stupid, it is vapid, it is ridiculously bad. A boy is grieving that his mother is dying of cancer, and he has to face his deepest fears, both in his waking life and in his dream world. He is bullied at school (and this isn't done very well either). A monster comes along who has the answers; well, he doesn't have the answers, because as he says, life is complicated, humans are complicated. So boy, just face the world, tell/live the truth, do the best you can, life is tough. Yes, this is a monster: he is tough, but he is also gentle, kind, patient. Oh, he speaks such profound truths in that monster voice of his. It's pathetic, really.

The boy has this bizarre need to destroy things. He destroys everything in his grandmother's sitting room. Yet everyone, including the monster, tells the boy that it's just fine: if you need to destroy, then destroy you must. The great Sigourney Weaver, though at least her English accent is passable, has absolutely no chemistry with the actor who plays the boy, and maybe that's because his performance is vile.

Yes, the special effects with the monster are quite good - that's the only decent thing about this joke of a movie.

Nobody seems to get one of the obvious truths of this story, which is that the boy is in his own way is clearly a monster. And now, having exorcised my own demons about this awful movie, I can put this bad experience behind me.

The subject line is the exact opposite of the last movie review I wrote here, and I hadn't even seen this awful movie. As I've gotten older I've come to like the expression, "if you can't say something good, don't say anything," but this movie is so bad I've got to add my review to the few negative ones here.

The beginning of the movie is in fact one of the better scenes, and it's stupid, and implausible for numerous reasons. Don't tell me two bathroom doors are going to suddenly become inoperable, it's just not believable.

The movie goes downhill from there. The couple who meet in the weird bathroom scene get married and have a child, and I could already see problems with the script, but you never know. In fact, from the point they have the child the movie becomes an unmitigated disaster. She is very mentally ill and has "New Age" ideas about how to raise the child. I am not saying that the two are related, though maybe to the writer they are in some way. Whatever, her ideas are not working, and the child is not developing properly, and it's more than just that it's too small. The husband (Adam Driver performs quite well in his role, somehow) finally has enough of it and has to sneak the baby out to a doctor, who tells him the baby is in trouble.

The mother is not only very mentally ill, but also quite stubborn: it's going to be her way, and only her way. Sometimes when told the truth about the baby or given advice she simply acts like a deaf mute and says nothing. Other times she repeats the same mantras she believes, like some kind of robot. Her face constantly show misery and she's always sullen. When the husband talks to her with kindness and obvious affection, she is often rude and picks fights.

I am not an expert on these things, but to me it was obvious that the actress didn't like her character. Maybe a more skilled actress could have done more with the material, and (I may be way off) such an actress might have made suggestions about improving a badly written character. Driver's character grows in his fatherhood; the female lead never changes in any way, and it really affects the (entertainment) value of the movie.

I've rarely seen a movie, even a bad movie, where the camera work wasn't correct. Whoever did the camera work in this movie acted like a student, trying out different things just to see how they would turn out, and whoever did the edit retained some awful cinematography, or whatever the word is. There were many close-ups that were unnecessary (no, they had nothing to do with "intimacy"), and worse other scenes with weird camera angles and distortions that just added to the displeasure of watching such a bad movie.