raktheundead

The Nobel Prize committee really seem to be trying hard to make this the worst set of awardees ever, aren’t they? All we need is another Kissinger-esque situation for the Peace Prize and a Handke-esque situation for the Literature prize and they’ll have disgraced the Nobel Prizes permanently.

inb4 “hurting the feelings of the Chinese people”

First of all, it suffers from what TV Tropes would call the Eight Deadly Words: “I don’t care what happens to these people”. I won’t fault the acting; I feel the actors did the best they could with the writing they had. It’s just that I thought the writing was extremely uncompelling and there was nothing about the characters which made me want to learn more about them or their troubles.

Secondly, I don’t like the structure of the film. It’s a melodrama, a type of story that I do not enjoy by default, with some plot points that are so heavily telegraphed that it sucked the energy out of the film. The multiverse structure that the film relies on was uncompelling to me. The action scenes lacked any sort of visceral impact to bring them back down to Earth; they were so obsessed with flashiness that there was nothing for me to connect with.

And thirdly, while I can enjoy absurdist humour, this film felt like it thought it was cleverer than it was throughout. I’ve heard a description elsewhere of this film as “nicecore Rick & Morty” and while that’s awfully reductive, it still gets to the root of some of the problems I had with the film.

I don’t know how to do spoilers on Kbin and frankly, most of that movie is a walking spoiler alert. Without giving too much away, it had to do with an oblique reference to another movie.

Contrarily to the general opinion, I found this a turgid and unpleasant experience to watch; there was a single moment in the film that amused me in passing, but they ended up taking that joke and beating the dead horse so hard you could use it as a dynamo.

Well, yeah. They’re also partially responsible for the anti-choice movement in Ireland.

Unfortunately, I despised Everything Everywhere All At Once myself; there’s a single moment in that movie that I considered to be funny in passing, but they decided to labour on that point and run it into the ground.

Definitely better than what did win the Oscar, which I sat through with disdain throughout.