julius-maerz

I was not born yet during the separation of Eastern and Western Germany, so I can´t speak to any nostalgic value that this movie might have for people who experienced this crucial part of German history. However, this movie fails in almost every other aspect. I really don´t want to be mean, but I think this might have been the worst movie that I have seen in the cinema this year.

The first thing you notice is how bad it looks. The colour coding is fine, but overall it just looks cheap. I am sure this was not a big budget production (aside from the pretty high level cast), but particularly the "action" sequences have this "TV commercial" look. It is hard to describe, but I could not unsee it once I noticed it. Some scenes are also edited in a weird way where the camera lingers on for a few seconds, even though the characters have left the scene already, which makes everything seem very slow.

The second thing you notice is the unnatural sounding dialogue. The conversations don´t flow naturally, many sentences are phrased in a way that might sound good written out on paper, but no one would actually talk like that. Scenes have to get from one point to another, and you can tell that the dialogue tries to get there as quickly as possible, without bothering to make it sound authentic.

But what´s worst is the plot itself that is overall very inconsistent, poorly structured, lacks tension, and does at times not make much sense.

The basic premise of stealing old money and trying to turn it into new one is very straightforward. Add making a little fun about the greedy Westerners and you have a fun little movie. But the movie takes itself way too seriously. It wants to make big statements about how money corrupts, how they will deliver justice to their neighbourhood, how they have been lied to by their government...but all these themes are totally underexplored, because there are too many of them. In one scene, the movie goes into one direction, characters seem to be motivated by a certain thing, just to abandon this plotline completely and have everyone focus on something completely different. This is also exemplified by the one guy from the "love triangle" that wants to leave, then wants to come back, then wants to leave, then wants to come back etc. What outcome are we rooting for?

While the whole story is going for a "feel-good" vibe, it turns very childish instead in my opinion. The sequences of stealing the money and being chased by the guards feel like taken straight from a cartoon. Conflicts (out of which there are few) are resolved immediately before they can build up actual tension. Meanwhile side characters (out of which there are too many) are reduced to one-dimensional stereotypes. The way the story is told is targeted at children, while those children will most likely not be able to relate to the topic of the movie at all.

And just a brief point about the main plot itself (SPOILER ALERT). Their plan of buying as many western goods as possible with their "worthless" money and then selling them in the West to make a profit is already pretty implausible. Do they really think they will be able to privately sell back all those insane amounts of stuff that are being sold in the West anyway? Fine. But you are telling me, that this fraction of money that will be brought into the German market from this one residential block is enough to make the German government worry about inflation? Come on. This whole security apparatus in the money storage facility is also ridiculous. They are guarding piles of worthless money with an armada of machine gun slinging guards and vehicles, that are then bribed into letting everyone go by getting a microwave? Kids movie, sure.

Overall, I did not have high expectations, but it was still a disappointing experience. Even the great actors could not save it. 2/10.

Peacock is just a really good movie. There is not much more to say about it. The story is very concise. It has a clear setup and payoff, every scene has its purpose and it builds up to an ending that is phenomena and brings everything full circle. The topic of "faking it" to meet society´s expectations is something that most of us will feel familiar with, but it is a joy to see it taken to the absolute extreme, and explore, what that it do to a person, if they never allow themselves to be...Themselves. It has a lot of funny scenes but the overall topic really made me reflect on myself and all the times, I squeezed myself into a "role", just because that was what I perceived what other people wanted me to be like. I would watch it again in a heartbeat and feel comfortable to highly reccommend it to anyone who is going to the cinema to receive "food for thought" in an entertaining manner.

I feel like this movie had all the parts to make it a beautiful experience, but it failed to put them together properly. The initial mystery in act 1 is quite intriguing and makes you wonder, what this kind-looking man Chuck, that keeps popping up in advertisements all over the world has to do with the planets looming demise. But acts 2 and 3 (or 2 and 1, as the movie decides to engage in "reverse" storytelling) fail to convey a coherent story or motive. It is all losely held together by the premise of "being your true self" and "you are all the things that you experience and all the memories that you make" but the way these themes are shown are on the one hand to vague to truly get you invested, but on the other hand also riddled in clichees. The grandpa giving a discouraging speech to the kid about how it is more important to stick to tangible things like math, than to creative aspirations. The teacher giving a 5 minute talk to his ex-wife about "how we are only a blip second in the eternity that is the universe". The kid finally overcoming his fears of expressing himself at the most clichee high-school graduation dance scene of all time. It has the topics that are supposed to make you cry and feel hopeful at the same time, but they feel like you have seen them before a million times in better stories. And the most intriguing part of the plot, the most profound experience that the main character must have had had throughout his entire life is only revealed to us in the final scene. It would have been great to see, how this would have shaped his actions going forward, but in the timeline of the movie, we only get one scene of him afterwards. And while it includes an impressive dance choreography, it is not enough to fully capture the character´s whole underlying motivation. And the overall explanation of the initial mystery also kind of falls flat.

I left the cinema feeling nothing.