*** PREFACE: I may be the wrong audience to be leaving an opinion here, compared to the other first-time reviewers only gushing over it, but I wanted to touch on some thoughts about the actual story... ***
-- PSYCHOSoShal:
So right off the bat, I'm sorry, but the title is pretty meh. I don't even know how "Clickbait" has anything to do with the movie. You girls already had this perfect word you came up with that easily lent itself to any number of clever play-on-words titles sitting right in front of you with "SoShal". You could have gone with almost anything related to "Social _______" (The SoShal Experiment? SoShal Media Challenge?), the possibilities write themselves.
-- SoShal STANDING:
It was unconventional to say the least. Deftly produced as everything looked and sounded great and professionally put together, the lighting, the shot compositions, they all worked well... The dialogue however got a bit heavy with slogans, quotes, and influencer advice (which may have been apropos) but it all began to sound like fortune cookies to me.
Overall it reminds me of similar movies OCTOGAMES (2022) and FUNHOUSE (2019) which had similar plots, budgets, and a similar presentation of the "contest" with the use of a virtual host. Even the NPC SoShal workers felt indicative of SQUID GAMES, except because they came in different heights and wore their pants up high they reminded of those "Shy Guys" from Super Mario Bros., but with fencer masks.
And speaking of costuming, why did y'all have homegirl dressed up like one of those fortune teller machines (like from the movie BIG) the whole movie?
-- SoShal MEDIA INFLUENCE:
There is a lot about social media influencer culture that I'm just not familiar with, so I think movies like these would really benefit from having a proxy character for the audience to be introduced to things and how things work. A character who is discovering so the audience can discover (as commonly done in fantasy movies, card poker movies, science movies, stock trading movies) our own Neo in the Matrix.
Because as it stands I didn't quite get that these caricatures were indicative of what's popular on Youtube (LookLoop). Or why these characters were who best represented it.
I would've imagined in a story like this (and given what the villains were aiming to accomplish) it would've also included like an InstaModel, a self-important outrage media critic, a watch me eat stuff guy, a sexy try-on haul girl, and a conspiracy theorist as well. A whole gamut of "look at me" personalities.
-- SoShal ISSUES:
1. I didn't get how they all mostly knew of each other if they only had followings of 250K. Coincidence or convenience, but there are YouTubers with millions of followers that I either never heard of, or watch, or discovered years after everyone else did (and I loathe the day I learned what a Pewtipie was) so I can't imagine like Ron Tron, Lele Pons, Legal Eagle, the Corridor Crew, and Ryan George all just happening to be fans of one another (much less with smaller channels at just 250K subs).
2. I also didn't get what made the kid unboxing things channel be so believably popular. He seemed to be so disinterested in being in anything (including the movie itself) and had to have his mom feeding him lines to parrot the entire time like it's all still new to him. How would his fanbase not be put off by her disembodied voice constantly yakking off-camera like he's a ventriloquist dummy? How is that entertainment?
3. Also were all of their fanbases just sitting around online in empty virtual rooms waiting for them to randomly pop in to livestream record their 1-minute hostage videos? And with them filming these things side-by-side within earshot of each other, that is exactly what these videos would look like to any longtime fans of theirs.
4. Where would all of those new followers even come from and so suddenly if their uploads were being posted to each of their own hacked channels for their already existing audience? There was nothing mentioned about drawing in outside interest nor a hashtag from the start to encourage any crossover pollination from amongst each other's followings.
Actually that would've made more sense to have their live feeds simulcast across each others channels thus pooling all 6 of their 250K following into a potential 1.5 million net total.
-- LAST SoShal POINTS:
- WTF was on that eyeball? -
- LOL! The gun poking in/out of the cubby. -
- HUH? What happened to the rest of the Shy Guys? -
- HEY, the poster looks like the Looney Tunes "That's all folks!" background. -
- AND So what if some hacker deletes your faux-youtube account, it's 2024 and these are supposed to be successful influencers, wouldn't they have other social media accounts to fall back on if they had to restart their "YouTube" channel?
Well that's it for my 4 and a half cents and some change.
