Reviews

It's easy to be jaded. So many great shows and movie series build up and up, only to end with a whimper, retroactively stripping the earlier material of much of its quality. They get you to care about the characters, they get you involved in the plot, only to pull a ridiculous left turn or lose their way entirely, hobbling off into oblivion.

Marvel could have joined those ranks. In fact, it was hard to see how they wouldn't do that. With all they'd built up over a decade plus, if they didn't deliver a great finale, it would have cast a retroactive shadow. Thankfully, I'm happy to say, they delivered all they needed to and more, cementing what will become known as the "Infinity Saga" as a generation-defining cultural behemoth that my kids will show their kids just as I've shared Star Wars with my own.

The movie is just over 3 hours, but it very much needs all of that time to tell the story it needs to tell. The scale of this thing is mind-boggling. So many huge actors. So many characters. It could have been a mess.

Instead, it hits all its marks expertly. It is both genuinely funny and genuinely emotional. The action serves a purpose and can be followed. The characters follow unforced, natural arcs that don't feel contrived or predetermined.

The movie focuses on Iron Man and Captain America above all, which is appropriate - they have been the divided (sometimes violently so) heart of the Avengers since at least Civil War, and their somewhat competing visions have shaped everything else. In the end, I left with an overwhelming sense that the story had gone exactly where it needed to go. It was fulfilling. I am in awe of the fact that they pulled this off.

My taste in films is normally fairly well aligned with critics. I like mainstream movies and arthouse films, and when something appeals to both kinds of audiences, it's usually a pretty solid bet that I will like it. This movie, from its reviews, seemed to fit that bill. I came out of it, more than anything else, confused.

The confusion didn't come from the plot of the movie, but from the sense that maybe I'd missed something. What was it about this film that made it stand out to people. Granted, Toni Collette is always good and she is here as well, and the cinematography/art direction was good. But the movie just isn't that good otherwise.

First, there's the girl. The promo materials focus on her a lot, even though she's a rather secondary character in the film. I don't like it when people are presented as being creepy simply because they are strange or unusual. The girl was not creepy to me. She seemed like she was just autistic or something.

Second, there is nothing scary about the movie. At all. While I give it credit for not resorting to jump scares, I just didn't find the atmosphere very scary. There was a lot of good emotional depth to it, especially Toni Collette's character, but it seemed like it was trying to be creepy and failing. The movie would have functioned way better as a drama about loss than it does as a horror film.

Third, it had elements that it presented as twists that I thought were astoundingly obvious and that it telegraphed way too much. I don't want to spoil anything, so that's all I'll say about that.

Fourth, I thought Gabriel Byrne was seriously miscast. I like him a lot as an actor, but he was too old for the role, seeming more like a grandfather than a father, and he lacked intensity and vigor that it seemed like his character should have had. It was distracting to me whenever he was in a scene.

All in all, a disappointment.

On a technical level, the movie is well-done. The directing is superb, and most of the acting is good. I love how the movie shows the urban decay of Detroit, making it look like a mix of suburban dream and war zone reality. At its heart, the movie is in many ways about broken dreams.

However, there is one huge flaw in the movie that, for me, completely knocked it down several pegs and undermined the entire thing, and that is that I disliked and felt no sympathy for no single character in it.

In order for suspense to work well, the viewer has to be invested in a character. If you don't care about anyone, you're not going to feel suspense when they are in danger. The characters in this are wholly unlikable and unsympathetic, despite rather shallow, cursory attempts at giving them sympathetic motivations.

I'm all for flawed, unlikable characters and anti-heroes. In fact, I prefer such characters. But there has to be something for the viewer to latch onto, something to invest in. Otherwise it's just watching people doing things on a screen.

If the movie weren't so well made on a technical level, I'd have ranked it much lower. I will definitely look for work by the director in the future. But this movie was disappointing, considering the high marks it seems to be getting from critics.

This movie is the epitome of "not for everyone." Many will find it boring and tedious, and they are well within reason to find it that way (that is, I cannot make a counterargument that it is filled with action).

That said, I have to say I quite enjoyed it. It is beautifully shot, and it has a unique, sinister mood that pervades it.

For the first half of the movie, I was worried that it wasn't going anywhere. It featured no real story, just a repeated series of bizarre events. I would say that this was done too many times, although it was intriguing to watch.

The latter part of the movie is more intriguing, once the protagonist (if you can call her that) begins to make interesting choices. The film certainly doesn't spell it out for you and requires both attention and thought.

I will say that the ending disappointed me a bit, although it was not jarring. Along the way, there were scenes that I wanted to understand but couldn't, and I got the sense that the director was being intentionally opaque, which I find is usually a cover for lack of depth (to paraphrase Nietzsche: those who possess true profundity strive for clarity, while those who only want to seem profound strive for obscurity). Some scenes drag on a bit too long, and others are just puzzling.

On a technical level - cinematography, sound, music - this film is a 10 of 10. Beautiful, with a good score. It's good that there is not much dialogue, as I couldn't understand a good chunk of what dialogue there was, since the Scottish accents were very thick (this is my own shortcoming, not the film's).

Scarlett Johansson does a good job of conveying the character without words, which is vital in a film like this.

In all, it's certainly worth seeing if you're into dark, odd movies.