Young Ones

I just watched this movie (yes a bit late to the game) and was amazed at the, well everything. It was a minimalist movie for the genre but did so much with what they had it seemed like a big budget film. The story is compelling and you actually come to feel emotions for the characters. The direction was outstanding with shots that brought you into the action while at the same time made you feel alone in the desert. Lastly the actors how this movie escaped the Academy is beyond me. Each one brought an element unique to their part of the story from Michael Shannon who was outstanding as the farmer who struggled to keep thing as sane as possible for his children and who hoped for better days with such devotion as to be palpable. To Nicholas Hoult who showed more range than any young actor has a right to. But the rest of the cast each added an element that together make this film amazing.

If you love the artistic and non-mainstream risks taken by art-house films, then Young Ones belongs on your watch list with other indie Sci-Fis such as Lars von Trier's Melancholia, Juan Solanas' Upside Down, and Terry Gilliam's The Zero Theorem.

A gritty film about pioneers in a drought ridden landscape, it's a futuristic dust bowl tale as grim as Grapes of Wrath. It's memorable and keeps your attention, while portraying Sci-Fi in a very believable way. The mix of poverty and high technology, the extremes of the haves and have-nots, and water shortages in the US, amplifies the current state of a society as all good sci-fi films do.

Good actors and acting, and gorgeous to watch. What's not to like?

It almost feels like someone adapted Shakespeare to a movie set in the near future where the economy had gone to hell and the US is almost without water. The film is slow, really slow, so that in two hours you don't see much. Paradoxically, some of the important scenes are rushed through, while others, related to character emotions are prolonged.

To me it felt both as a well done movie and a boring one. The practical effects, the acting, the shots, they were all excellent. The pacing and the story, on the other hand, a bit disappointing. I guess you have to be in the mood and you have to like the technique of film rather than just look for a story to entertain you.

Bottom line: Hard to call it a bad movie in any context, but only part of the viewers will be glad to have seen it. Let it go at its own pace, watch it from start to end, try to grasp the vision of the writer/director. Hope it works for you.

This is set in the future when after prolonged droughts water has become the most precious commodity on the planet. The story is told in three chapters from the perspectives of the three main players. Ernst Holm comes first; he has stuck it out on his dehydrated farmstead. He has alcohol issues, a wife in hospital and two young children, his daughter Mary and son Jerome.

He ekes an existence by servicing the local water mine and life is hard. His daughter has a beau in the shape of Flem Lever (Nicholas Hoult) who has designs on both her and her daddies land. He soon decides to put his designs into action with repercussions for all.

Now this is an indie effort and the CGI is excellent despite that. The story is a slow burner but it is one that is very much worth staying with. Michael Shannon an Ernst is particularly effective as the guilt ridden, hard bitten man who is clinging on to hope. The sci- fi parts in terms of machines are also done quite well, there is some action, but this is a character piece with violence as a driver for the story and not the raison d'être. I like dystopian futuristic films and this is one that goes for that in most parts whilst still clinging to some of the more regular societal norms and I felt they got the mix really well. If you like to have to think about a film, but not too much, then there may well be something of merit for you here.

The plot: After a catastrophic drought, a man and his two teenaged children attempt to survive in a post-apocalyptic society.

I wanted to like this more than I did. Everything about it seems like it would appeal to me. The problem is that I got a bit bored during a few slower parts of the film as I waited for the predictable plot to catch up to where I knew it was going. That's not a deal-breaker, but the scenes were telegraphed rather overtly early on, and anyone who's familiar with this sort of story can probably predict most of the film after twenty minutes. That said, it successfully avoided several annoying clichés in post-apocalyptic films: cannibals, biker gangs, raping all the female characters, and characters who do more yelling than talking. I was glad to see a post-apocalyptic film that was more concerned with characters than gratuitous elements such as these. Don't get me wrong: I love gratuitous exploitation films, but it's nice to have something a bit more restrained every now and then.

I would hesitate to truly recommend this film to fans of post-apocalyptic science fiction. There's certainly much to enjoy if you're starved for good entries in that genre, but it's nowhere near as good as The Road, which was a near-masterpiece. Certainly, the mood and atmosphere of that film was missing, and if you're looking for a truly bleak and depressing story, you won't find it here. This is a more traditional Western story in which a family survives in a near-lawless frontier. If you're more a fan of Westerns than post-apocalyptic films, then I can see how you might enjoy this more than I did. Even so, I think that you'd be better served by watching old Sergio Leone films. You won't get robotic mules, but you'll get much better cinematography and pacing. I can't remember a time when I was ever bored in a Leone film.