Snyder plays to his strengths using multiple realities as a tenuous excuse for the most absurd action sequences conceivable and manages to find a path to excellence via a heady amalgam of soft pornography and early nineties John Woo pumped full of crack.
Imagine The Matrix starring hot chicks in skimpy clothes written by someone who's never read a book.
ReplyDeleteOr...
Imagine the retarded female offspring of a night of passion between Shutter Island and Inception suffered from ADHD and looked stunning.
Or...
Imagine Zack Snyder's 15 year old wank fantasy.
Basically it's a video game with stunning game sequences (the action sequences) that sadly only make up 1/3 of the game; the rest being typically badly written, hollow cut scenes.
Fun, the time passed quickly, but essentially shit.
I really enjoyed it and downloaded the soundtrack. But I've got no idea why they'd give away the twist ending right at the start of the film. They didn't start Shutter Island by telling you Leonardo De Caprio was a nutjob. Spoiler.
ReplyDeleteI hear all the musical numbers were cut out, apart from in the end credits. How many DVD special editions until we get those?
So, brilliant and barely competent. Odd.
Joe, hint - you put 'Spoiler' first... I haven't actually seen Shutter Island yet ;-)
ReplyDeleteOh it's great. And is De Caprio really a nutjob? Well, you'll just have to watch and find out....
ReplyDeleteSpoiler.
he is.
I'm fairly confident you would have figured out the end of Shutter Island way before it got there, Ted; it wasn't a great surprise.
ReplyDeleteSadly not all the musical numbers were cut out so I had to endure the abominable cover of Where Is My Mind? Why would you download that?
Reading a bit more about this today a) I was right, Snyder reverse engineered the movie by coming up with the action sequences and then fashioning a "story" to fit them in, and b) Snyder thinks this vapid, sexist nonsense is actually saying something clever about cinema. It really is not.
The more this stews in my brain the more I'm disliking it. It's not, as I originally stated, "essentially shit", it really is phenomenally appalling. None of the characters are characters, none of the actors (except John Hamm's cameo) give performances, none of the timelines match or make sense, none of the realities have any danger so there is no tension, none of the dialogue should ever have been uttered, none of the (admittedly) cool action sequences have any relevance or link to anything.
Spoiler example
The very end, Babydoll "sacrifices" herself in a fantasy world. Sweetpea watches her get punched from the gate as she escapes, but this punch is actually John Hamm labotomising her in the real world. 30 seconds later John Hamm is told that she has already helped a patient escape, not that the patient is escaping right now. So the fantasies have no link to reality. And there's more and more that keep occurring to me.
I'm going to move this down my list of films I've seen this year, but not quite to the bottom.
No, my apologies Ed. No malice intended - I stupidly assumed we'd all seen Shutter Island. But James is right - it's not going to ruin the movie.
ReplyDeleteJames - it is indeed a woeful cover of Where is my Mind. But I do love all the songs. I should really just line up the originals. And I would like to see the Watchman-style five hour version of this, including the musical numbers! It HAS to make more sense than this...
Here come spoilers, such as they are...
As it is, those three levels of reality are utterly pointless. Why, why, why start with the asylum reality? They could've gone straight into bitchy showtune brothel reality - then the girls go into war fantasy to escape and find the strength to escape. Then at the end reveal that the brothel is just another defensive fantasy for a horrible, drab, naturalistic asylum. Something very different from the brothel and the charlie's angels worlds.
Now, that could've worked. Then at the end you pul back the last curtain - shown fire damage in the asylum, the mayor etc. Maybe even explain if/how the other girls were dead, rather than just forgetting them! And make sure you can tell it's not the brothel by the way it looks, rather than simply whether the guy's got a pimp tache. Now, that's not perfect, but it MAKES SENSE.
There's something deeply, deeply wrong with this film.
Still loved it though.