bnsw19

This is a remarkable film for succeeding in bringing together great actors around a mediocre script and an unoriginal idea. The film is too clever by halves. It has no soul. It's all style over substance. The setting is glitzy, brash and vulgar. It is form without content. Gosh, I absolutely loved the old Agatha Christie whodunnits with Hercules Poirot et al that this and Knives Out are obviously an homage (of sorts) to - they had charm and wit and panache, but this is just surface gloss. My wife walked out after 20 minutes but I stuck it through, thinking it had to get better... but it didn't. The problem is: one doesn't care. Not for any of the characters. They're two-dimensional. Sterotypes. I think I can just about remember the unoriginal ending but I hope to forget to all soon...

That just about sums it up. Wonderfully acted and directed and shot but I was just bored throughout. It might be the multi-universe thing - how implicated can we be if 'nothing matters'? How can we care about a character if the character is one of thousands of versions of themselves? How can we bothered how a story ends or whether someone dies or not if all possible endings exist in the totality of universes? Well, we can't. And who was 'the baddie' and why were they trying to take over the world (or whatever it was they were trying to do or for whatever reason they had to be fought)? I don't know. As a philosophy BA and a lover of 'boring' films - Antonioni, anyone? - I had great expectations for this one but they simply weren't met.

I got no further than the end of season one. The product placement is so in your face, so blatant, so prolonged, so protracted, so annoying, so tedious, so unsubtle, so relentless (a bit like this sentence) that it began to interfere with the story. Do father's and daughters really drink beer for breakfast? Only if it's Heineken and the camera can linger on the many bottle angles (label always visible) for ages. Is the bride really afraid of smelling? Only so she can roll Sure under both armpits with the label perfectly directed at the camera. Etc. I felt I was being sold to all the time and the product placement interfered with the story. By the end, it felt offensive.