Somehow both too much and too little. Breathlessly (and repeatedly) tries to inject meaning into things you will never care about even as it ignores things you’d desperately like to know more about. The stunts were great, as always, and I do enjoy Ethan Hunt vs The Entity as a parable for Tom Cruise (practical filmmaker) vs AI [in moviemaking] but even that high-minded interpretation is “too much” for a movie that should, above all, be something this rarely manages to be: fun.
This one wisely backseats the mystery killer element — far from a source of horror, the existence of a killer is mostly regarded by the characters as an inconvenience — and instead leans into its multiverse conceit to give us more of what we liked the first time, albeit in a novel flavour. If we must have time loops and multiverse shit, make it this.
One need not scratch much varnish off the surface of Australia’s easygoing reputation to uncover darkness. I went into this prepared for a critique of the “locals only” mentality that continues to foment social unrest on beaches in Australia (see also: the Cronulla race riots). Instead, my brain got turned inside out in the best way.
My read is, it must be said, highly idiosyncratic. As an immigrant to this country, it’s easy for me to view tensions from a safe remove that borders on anthropological. A study like this one, then, can stun me without damaging my pride.
But there is also the part of me that is from a place (West Virginia) that, as I grow older and spend more time in Australia, I struggle to accept will never be “home” again. I spent 25 years in the USA and am in my 16th here. Eventually I’ll have lived in Australia — a place where I’ll never be “local” — for longer than I lived in Appalachia, a place that will never again see me as “local”. There will never be a place I can surf, as it were. Existential dread in that same vein is rendered here with heartfelt texture.
Just Alain Delon being beautiful, even with his lil moustache. You come to Melville for vibes and set pieces, and this movie has plenty of both. Perfectly and deliberately paced; wins you over nice and slow like.
Holy hell, this is one of the most intense movies l’ve seen in a long time. Juliette Gariépy is absorbing — a black hole at the centre of a morbid and constricting obsession. The score overwhelms in the best way. I wish I could have seen this in a cinema.
Bonus — It had two split diopter shots for my collection:
I’m an unapologetic lover of this kind of sweeping genre-masher; one which echoes itself even as it unfolds from within those echoes. Léa Seydoux puts her whole heart into a performance that earns its final moment (the emotion of which I will not spoil).
An encounter with art has two sides: you find the art as it is but on the reverse, art finds you as *you* are. The latter consideration is as underappreciated as it is salient; all we have is our emotional response. Suffice to say, l’ve been “going through some stuff” and it turns out, so have these characters. This film moved me to tears and intellectually stimulated me in a way l’d have never thought possible for a Marvel movie.
Had the thought “I would’ve loved this back when I was first getting into movies” and that’s the headline: I’ve simply seen too many movies and this one didn’t care to subvert my expectations.
(Also: it didn’t seem to know how to be commentary on abuse despite manifestly wanting to be, and this felt somehow offensive)
Another in a collection of films I’ll call “curiosities”: films which don’t really tick all of my boxes but which I’m glad somebody made (so we can continue to have nice things). I laughed a fair bit in the early going — mostly at Tatiana Maslany’s irreverent line readings — but eventually actual jokes give way to lines in the vague shape of jokes, and that wore thin after a while.
Something rather special, and I’m instantly wanting to see it again. The IMAX sequences were breathtaking and reminded me of why I fell in love with moviegoing. Not sure if it’s good or bad that I saw this while in an existential funk, as I’ve been feeling increasingly placeless in a way that this movie thoughtfully interrogates (albeit toward ends more universal than just myself).
