soundoflight

This film completely underwhelmed me and left a bad taste in my mouth for several reasons. For one, it seems absolutely unrealistic. Right from the start, it overtly looks and feels like a 2020s take on the past. This takes the viewer out of the film and also causes the viewer to slightly mistrust what is being presented to them. It's quickly apparent that this is going to be a 'Hollywood' film, with A-list highly politically charged actors, and some of these politics seem have bled into the film.

One of the biggest problems with the film is that it leaves the viewer with nobody to root for. All the white characters are over the top despicable, while the Native American characters just fade into the background. For one, they seem to be barely featured (sadly and to a detriment of the film), and second they can't compete with the cartoonish villains surrounding them. There's a certain irony to this treatment of the Native characters that will be completely lost on the type of people who made this film.

The film almost becomes unwatchable through the meandering middle sections but gains some strength when the 'Federal Investigator' characters enter the scene and at least there is a linear narrative to follow to the end from that point forward.

The filmmaking itself is quite underwhelming, with lousy and repetitive music plastered over everything, nothing special with the cinematography (when the western genre offers so much opportunity), and very gratuitous gory violence used for no real reason. If this is the best modern Hollywood has to offer, we are in trouble.

This film starts off quite fantastic. Seeing the young "Weird Al" was interesting and funny. The film makes you want to see how this quirky kid becomes a star... but that's not the film we get. At some point rather early on, the film essentially "jumps the shark" and launches into this bizarre alternative fantasy-reality that just gets more and more "weird" as the film progresses. By the end, it had totally lost me. It felt like an inside joke that everyone gets but you.

In Weird Al's cult classic film "UHF" (which I love), there was tons of over the top fantasy stuff, but the key difference is that those sequences were not the core of the movie - the core of the movie was firmly based in some semblance of reality. With this film, all pretense of reality is dropped in favor of what seems to be something incredibly self-indulgent. The sad thing is that I think if they had just 'played it straight' and perhaps included a few daydream fantasy vignettes like in "UHF," it could very well have been another smash hit.

I had really high hopes for this movie - a glossy, well-shot period piece of the disaster that helped bring down the Soviet Union made by Russians. I wondered what new insights might be brought to light by those who would know best. Would it confirm the portrayals of the HBO Chernobyl series, or deny them?

What I was not expecting is that it would not touch on those topics in the slightest. This film is mostly a melodramatic romance between a fictional firefighter and a fictional hairdresser that uses the Chernobyl disaster as its backdrop. The political ramifications of Chernobyl are merely hinted at in a few brief moments. So we are mostly left with a hammy romance story.

What makes the film watchable/tolerable is that it is extremely well shot and the 1980s USSR really comes to life in full blazing color. If one is into romance flicks set in the USSR, this one might be for you.