Always Watching: A Marble Hornets Story

Did the creators of this movie just go, "We'll get permission to do a 'spinoff' of Marble Hornets, loosely 'borrow' their Slenderman-type villain's name and symbol, make a couple blink-and-you'll-miss-them references to the web series... and that way, we won't get too much crap for trying to make our own Slenderman found-footage move."

Because that plan totally backfired. This is not a Marble Hornets story. They totally screwed up how the Operator works, and with the exception of one tiny reference to the Alex Kralie character, this movie has nothing to do with Marble Hornets canon.

What would've been better is if they'd gotten Joe and Tim to write an actual Marble Hornets movie, and still kept Doug Jones as the Operator.

I'm a pretty big fan of the "Marble Hornets" YouTube series. Gotta say though, this was a pretty big letdown.

None of the personality, intrigue, or clever storytelling of the original series makes it into the movie.

Average at best. But considering how strong the OG stuff was, this is a pile of crap.

So I ran across two movies that seemed pretty similar; this and The Levenger Tapes. They're both found footage and I decided to go with this one first, after reading some reviews and seeing this also had a YouTube series, I figured it would be the better of the two. After watching them both, I highly recommend the Levenger Tapes over this. I found this pretty boring and started falling asleep at the end. This just didn't add anything new to the found footage genre. The whole "evil entity only visible through a camera" has already been done, so nothing exciting here. There's not really anything in particular that makes the movie awful, but nothing makes it entertaining either. Just overall boring with a played out premise.

Okay, the big point of contention about this movie revolves around the Marble Hornets tag. For those not in the know, Marble Hornets was an ongoing, found footage web series, that spanned several years and many hours. You can catch it for free on YouTube. Without going into any detail, it was basically a found footage college project, that started getting a bit spooky and going horribly wrong. It was very well done, but did get very, very convoluted and confusing towards the end.

This movie had absolutely no connection to the web series, and would probably have done better if it was not associate with Marble Hornets. The only common thread is the character, The Operator, who was basically a representation of the Creepy Pasta character, The Slenderman. Had they run with the Slenderman storyline, it may have been more accepted than associating itself to the Marble Hornets name, which has an avid following. Putting aside the differences, as a stand alone movie, it is average, if not a little predictable, hence the 5 stars.

I'll mention first that while I've heard of the Marble Hornets series, I went into this film with only a small notion of the slenderman mythos, as I've never watched any of the Marble Hornets videos. So this movie will be rated and reviewed as a standalone, from someone with no background in Marble Hornets.

"Always Watching" certainly didn't redefine the FF genre, although it at least had an excellent built-in explanation as to why the cameras continue to role even once things get bad. The editing, especially for the first 30 mins of the movie is pretty bad, as another person noted. That improved quite a bit in the second half of the movie IMO. I recognized all the leads, from one show or another, and they did well, though their characters weren't really fleshed out, and some of the dialogue was kinda lame. The premise was good, but the payoff wasn't really there. I see what they tried to do, they just didn't stick the landing..

Is this movie scary? Not really. You pretty much spend almost all of the movie looking the for the guy to show up lol. Maybe I missed him in a cpl scenes, but I thought he was kinda under-used... So much creep factor there, why not use it? But I was, admittedly, quite engaged with the movie throughout, and it gave my nerves a lil jolt from time to time.

I wish they had gotten more into why this stuff was going on, how it was going on, etc. All and all, I wouldn't pay much money to see it, I'm sure it will land on Netflix eventually. But if you like FF, or slenderman stuff, you may enjoy it.