Ladiloque

Elegant and delicate tale of 2 girls escaping from their summer camp to get their own vacation. Too slow, uneventful and unemotional unfortunately.

The overflowing sense of freedom, curiosity, thirst for life we expect from the (probably first) experience of young evasion after an existence protected and aseptic is nowhere to be seen. Even the clumsiness, the boldness of youth aren't there. Maybe just a form of innocence so naive and clean that it's hard to find realistic.

Maybe it's just me being detached from youngsters. Or maybe it's me not having any idea of how some lives are lived.

But I don't feel much from watching such a static display of happenings that don't stir any significant action or emotion in the characters - if not the most obvious ones.

Maybe it was the authors' goal to depict everything almost as not alive anymore, far in a past that weakly disappears, timidly scared that something might break. But I'm here for emotions and entertainment, not to decipher the "brilliancy" in the mind of the writers.

And as far as emotions go, there isn't much to talk about - except for 2-3 short scenes. 1 point more just because it doesn't pretend to be more than what it is and focuses on a very hard topic without any particular misstep.

My goal in watching this film was to like it. I even wisely distributed it in 4 sessions, with slightly accelerated frames, because 3:30h of this heavy drama in less sessions was definitely too much for me.

Yet I have to say this is a bad movie. I don't even feel like digging more into the screenplay than what I gathered from watching it once.

The motives of the main characters are all weak. The tension while the main happenings take place is systematically missing - except for a couple of very good scenes.

At least 1 hour of the movie could be easily cut improving by much the result - possibly even much more than that.

Some characters make no sense, others are just useless.

What is left? Nice scenographies, nice cinematography. And the promise of a movie about the injustices at the roots of our modern societies, led by elites whose inherited wealth is dirt with innocent blood.

I don't really remember much of the original Gladiator, except for single frames which were undoubtedly very powerful. I enjoyed it, but almost 25 years have passed: that is several tv series with focus on Rome and the gladiators' life and quite a lot of historically set action-dramatic television and cinema.

So: is there really an expressive or artistic purpose behind this movie other than cashing out on the franchise?

TLDR: no. This latest effort from the celebrated director R. Scott, is a weak, melodramatic, and sometimes even ridiculous action movie with trashy unbelievable drama to keep the plot together.

I even wonder why at his age, he would waste his time to do this, instead of doing pretty much anything else: really hard to think to something worse than directing this mediocre hollywood packaged blockbuster wannabe.

Or not even that: producers might even expect that this isn't going to be a blockbuster, but it's going to sell well enough for their pockets to be happy. Still I wonder why someone as RS could be ok contributing to this.

In a very synthetic way: the movie is a totally predictable wrestling fantasy with CGI, except for the most stupid plot twists that - if you saw them coming - you should probably have doubts about your own sanity...

The best part of the movie was looking on wikipedia how historically inaccurate the whole thing is and deciding how low a rating it should deserve.