sogoodlooking

So much promise, too little follow through. A strong premise and superb first episode are undermined by a lack of consistent talent. Between the gratuitous crassness, the pointless bloat, a generally weak cast, too many flat scenes, too much unaffecting writing, The Magicians too rarely takes flight.

So much promise, too little follow through. A strong premise and superb first episode are undermined by a lack of consistent talent. Between the gratuitous crassness, the pointless bloat, a generally weak cast, too many flat scenes, too much unaffecting writing, The Magicians too rarely takes flight.

The sheer laziness of the production, though, is almost unprecedented. Episodes routinely default to idiocy such as two people pointing guns at each other at a distance of something like twelve feet, as if such a scenario is a legitimate standoff, when of course the first person to fire would win such a confrontation 98% of the time.

Then we have half the episodes ending with the nominal hero about to be killed by gunfire only for his FBI handlers to burst in, previously unheard even when the confrontation occurs in the bowels of an abandoned warehouse, and halt the execution with split-second timing---and this is hardly the most ridiculous thing the series indulges in.

Amusing in its way to read several viewer's reviews here bemoaning the series' 'sexism' in its treatment of women (who are invariably gifted, attractive, accomplished professionals who fight to a draw with the protagonist when they don't get the better of him) but having nothing to say about regularly getting the handsome lead out of his shirt for the most preposterous reasons under the unlikeliest circumstances.

Apparently what's sauce for the geese isn't permitted any longer for the ganders. Pity.

The Substance might have been mildly interesting cut to 80 minutes rather than at its ridiculous, bloated 140 minute runtime.

Cliched throughout, it would have been stale a decade ago. What, aging male actors aren't thrown aside the way aging female actors are? What, it's not the case that even a movie's fourth male lead now needs a six-pack, biceps, and broad shoulders?

Then there's the director's delirious exploitation through camera crawls over beautiful female bodies, when those bodies aren't erupting into pustules and broken faces.

The Substance might have had something interesting and rare to say about the emotional pain and loss of aging thanks to the script's compression of time and transformation, where aging produces genuine horror in how a body can go from desired, a vessel for romance and enchantment, to something ugly and deformed compared to what it once was, compared to its youthful delights---but Fargeat's craving for shock after shock after shock overwhelms any interest she might have in the realities of aging and its losses.

The film also errs badly in making its protagonist an empty vessel, someone with absolutely nothing going on for her aside from being attractive. In that regard she's had all the advantages, but nothing is made of it.