ikadery

After finishing the film, I was supposed to be emotional, even for a bit. Unfortunately, I was nonchalant, forcing myself to question what had happened? Why I didn't care that much? Then I realized what's wrong with this film.

First of all, I only at best superficially empathized with June while she's trying to find her mom. Why's that? I think I know the answer! I recently read a book called 'The Personal MBA' by Josh Kaufman, there's a lesson named 'Novelty', which basically says that if you throw new new things at people after short intervals, they'll never get bored, many companies use this strategy, that's why we never get bored at scrolling facebook, playing video games, or surfing the internet. Now, this film is far from boring, because there's new developments in every 2-3 mins, the writers used the 'Novelty' concept successfully to grab the attention of the audiences. But in doing that, they failed to develop something crucial, they forgot to develop June's character and her relationship with her mom properly, so it's difficult for the audiences to be emotionally invested in June's Story.

Secondly, the end of the movie was anticlimactic at best, even the villain is underdeveloped here, used a stereotypical villain to wrap things up, which accentuates the writers' incompetence in engaging the audiences emotionally with the film's characters.

It's not a bad movie, acting was good, no complaints there, but this film had great potential, which is squandered by the people behind this film.

The plot of this film is nothing new, it reminds us of 1950s sci-fi horror films, especially 'Invasion of the Body Snatchers(1956)', which probably was sampled to write the story of this movie. The two leads gave stellar performances, no doubt, but their talents are kind of wasted in this film. The film has its twists and turns, some are intriguing, but still, holistically they couldn't interweave a story absorbing enough even for a B movie. And the film's botched attempt to preposterously philosophize about how 'love' is unique and all, in the whole universe is quite dreadful. Other aspects of the film like photography, editing, score etc. Is spot on, the runtime is perfect, this film truly deserved a better plot which would've been commensurate with every other aspect of the film.

Willem Dafoe, Christoph Waltz, and Rachel Brosnahan- by looking at the top billing of this film and the name of the director, it's not wrong to expect a decent film. But this movie fails at almost every aspect, from the cookie-cutter revisionist western storyline to bad editing, it's atrocious, maybe only apart from the acting. There are so many unnecessary scenes that even someone who doesn't know the ABC of film editing would agree to the fact that there are so many needless scenes. And also, this film feels like it's overrun by at least 20 mins, good editing would've kept the runtime under 90 mins, just like most of Budd Boetticher's famous westerns, whom this film is dedicated to.