The Human Race

i'm honestly just writing this because of the high score and 2 rave reviews obviously written by people involved with the project. i feel like i was duped into watching it. so here's an honest review: this is a terrible movie. it's poorly written, and badly acted. only exception is the deaf girl. she wasn't bad, given the material she had to work with.

it's just lazy filmmaking, seems like. says nothing about the human condition (as purported from the existing reviews), only the sophomoric insight of a film-school reject who saw one too many eli roth movies.

seriously, avoid at all costs.

The Human Race is not that bad at all, yes it's got it's faults but is an interesting movie, that pits completely random people against each other in a bid to find the most resilient. The ending came as another supprise to me, and actually left me wanting more. Give it a try then decide for yourself, but definitely don't believe the extreme low ratings some have given.

I am actually going to give this film a 6.5 and the reason why is because yes it was made on a small budget but to be honest its original.

the acting is not as bad as some are saying or some I have seen.

To give it a three would not be fair but i can see where a previous post did this in order to try to make the rating more realistic. I think about 6.7 maybe.

Don't shun it it has a decent share of blood and a couple of deaths were pretty good.

Give it a chance is all you need to do. The start was enough to make me sit and watch it and I thought it was OK.

Final thought....... Give it a chance scifi/horror fans.

Here is another film that takes the idea of Battle Royale or Hunger Games and tries to spin its own twist on things. Here the twist is running to survive, keep off the grass and don't get lapped. This premise wasn't too bad, but while the previous films I mentioned are all set in reality, this one takes a step back from reality with the people being magically transported to this running location (which still looks like an average neighbourhood location), you spend the film wondering, is it magic, is it supernatural, is it alien, do I really care? And why if the powers behind this race had such ability would they choose all the people from a small city block area rather than individuals from a variety of places? And why this area specifically? The cast are passable, and the writing definitely attempts to give depth and diversity to the characters, but there are as many bad characters as good which leaves you struggling to relate to most of them. Apparently the film was made of many years and perhaps this is why it feels a bit disjointed and lacks a cohesive flow. It's not terrible but it would definitely be very low on your watch list and there are much better films you could be seeing.

I surprised that this movie turned out so divisive, while certainly not everyones cup of tea it is certainly very memorable and interesting. I like simple set-ups like this, classic battle royal setup, clearly communicated rules for the audience and participants to understand and a diverse range of characters from all ranges of life.

The Human Race cleverly avoids offering a clear protagonist to root for allowing you to pick your own champion or play the "what would I do" game in your head. All of that achieves one thing: it makes the movie more engaging, if you are willing to engage with it. It helps that the pacing, editing and cinematography move things along quickly without much downtime.

The performances are a bit hit and miss, some are terrible (cyclist guy) some are okay (one legged guy) and some are really good (especially the deaf girl). The effects are serviceable, some digital blood effects look better than others, but overall a good production for its budget level. So even without going into the aspect of potentially pretentious commentary on the human condition, the movie works fine just on a surface level, if you want to interpret it deeper, that's okay, there are some interesting observations sprinkled in.

Without spoiling it, the ending did not work for me, the movie should have ended 3 minutes earlier and it would have been better. Despite that, I recommend it, it's better than Circle or The Belko Experiment which had a similar setup...