RickBrands

This movie is just a rethread of From Dusk 'till Dawn - only tremendously more pretentious and drawn-out.

Don't get me wrong: I'm an ally regarding any form of anti-racism et cetera, but that doesn't change my opinion about this movie. It's ridiculously long, with a bunch of 'endings' the essentially straight-forward story truly didn't deserve, and it also takes far too long to get going.

Sure: the acting is great, and so is the cinematography - but come on: the 'comedy' is hardly ever funny, and the 'horror' is too sparse and unconvincing for me to ever even consider it to be truly terrifying.

Also: is this movie really doing its best to be racist towards Irish immigrants? I don't really understand that particular decision.

Furthermore: the only native Americans in the movie are introduced early on, as a 'vampire hunter' team - only to never show up again. What was that about - as in a 'token representation' kind of thing? I don't like it, and it also shows that the screenwriters were just throwing things together, without any cohesive idea of where to go with the story.

No: it IS overrated - and that's not my opinion because of its blackness - quite the contrary. I was hoping for more, that's all.

I just finished watching the final episode - and all I could think was: "Well, wasn't that convenient?"

But seriously: like, five times in twenty minutes' time, there was a forced plot contrivance. A goddamn toddler with a chewed-up crayon between its cross-legged tiny toes could've scrawled a more cohesive screenplay on a wad of wet newspaper than this muddled, hurried mess. And then, there's the silly-ass fake-out - as if anyone would be able to believe for a fraction of a second that the main character could've been unceremoniously axed like that. Just bad, BAD storytelling - and regarding the closing song: STAY AWAY FROM SOUNDGARDEN DAMMIT. R. I. P. Chris Cornell.

This is probably the worst developmental pacing, character development, and emotional story arc I've seen in a series since the last two seasons of Game of Thrones. At this point, it's safe to say: Screw Warner Bros. And HBO Max, or whatever they wanna call themselves nowadays.

They've clearly learned nothing from their mistakes. Same goes for the godawful GoT pay-to-win scam video game they've just released. It's infuriatingly sad how they keep abusing their IPs.

So, I just came back from a screening of Killers of the Flower Moon, which surpassed The Irishman (175,000,000$), Scorsese's previous record for most expensive (somewhat) biographical film ever made, by twenty-five million dollars.

Mathematically, that comes down to about a million bucks a minute of actual story; this movie has a 206' runtime, including the end credits which take well over a quarter of an hour. Not only that, but I think Thelma Schoonmaker could've easily left at least twenty minutes of filler on the cutting room floor - but that was also my opinion regarding both The Irishman and Silence, so there's that. All three just felt like needlessly spun-out, and yes, pretentious attempts at 'cinematic grandstanding' that lost sight of what movies should be all about: telling a good story well.

Now, I'm not a big fan of most of those Disney/DC roller coasters either, but I think both extremes are totally, and tonally, missing that simple point.

Thing is: it's an okay movie, based on a terribly fascinating piece of harrowing history, but I just don't feel it was communicated within the right kind of gritty atmosphere; if anything, Scorsese could've created a far more gripping experience if all of it hadn't looked so polished, postured, and 'perfected'. I'm not just talking about the admittedly stunning, but overly slick cinematography, but also the squeaky-clean costumes, which mostly held their anachronistically 'off-the-rack' gloss as year upon year passed by storywise. It just felt inauthentic to me - one egregious example of this is a significant Stetson hat that DiCaprio's character is gifted at the start of the movie, which doesn't even look remotely crumpled or worn far further on in the story.

The acting by pretty much everyone is wonderful, though (especially Lily Gladstone, who positively obliterates DiCaprio), as are the soundtrack and often witty, powerful dialogues, but the overall pacing and character development, to me, felt way off - which made an already long movie feel like an even longer slog to get through (kinda like this run-on sentence). To top it all off, without spoiling too much, it all ends in a weirdly incongruent coda that felt both tacky and tacked on, concluding in a bloviating self-insert by Mister Director, which positively reeked of shameless narcissism.

That being said: I don't think this is a bad movie at all - but still. Two hundred million dollars? This should've been a full-blown masterpiece, and it's decidedly not.