Matt Reeves/J.J. Abrams/Drew Goddard, 2007
[I saw this a few weeks ago, and as this is about to wrap up in cinemas I normally wouldn't bother, but this only really took on fuller proportions recently.]
Earlier, I praised this film’s conceptual height and its trailers, and generally failed at my attempt to convey just how fucking excited I was about this film. Having now seen it, two interrelated things surprised me.
First: not even the most detailed and insightful analysis of this note-perfect psuedo-genre film conveyed just how high-concept this purebreed near-experiment is. Maybe the most idiomatic film to ever grace 235 Australian screens at once, it functions without fault within a number of much-discussed zeitgeist-ey stylistic aesthetics, most overtly the youtube-orientated “captured for posterity” perspective/motivation. But why this film triumphs over many attempts at capturing that singular über-personal POV is that it not only fills out its backstory with one of the most genius storytelling devices in cinema (which actually simultaneously furthers its already fascinatingly realised internal reality), but it never ever breaks idiom; it actually remaining stylistically flawless whilst never revealing the writer’s hand in events, never placing events anywhere near too pat or too convenient.
The second was more surprising: this very idiomatic rigorousness is what audiences have reacted to the most, indeed have hated. Endless reports of booing and vocal mid-screening abuse preceded a torrent of baseless opinions and snobbish scoffing and, subsequently, an abrupt halt to its previously concrete box office.
The troubling ramifications of this seem to be part of a worrying trend, lately involving the recent wave of wonderful and somewhat unconventional (esoteric?) works receiving critical attention: both No Country For Old Men and the otherwise reasonably accessible Atonement have been the focus of many “what was that stupid ending?” complaints, and I certainly remember more than a few similar reactions to the wonderful though more conventional Half-Nelson’s lack of resolve. Are audiences becoming less tolerant of this kind of experimentation? Is idiomatic/narrative experimentation getting too abstract for audiences now fully comfortable with, among other things, reality television? It seems arguable that, increasingly, audiences do indeed want to see the same film time and time again, and breaking with these established narrative modes results in an inaccessible “art film”. Even if it is about a giant monster.
Final note: stay for the credits.
