talentest

This isn't a movie, it's an endurance test. I suspect that the person who made this is the one that included it as a "comedy" as the "film" itself even existing seems to be the joke.

There is no cast listed because there is NO cast; no cinematographer listed because there is NO actual footage being played; no production crew, producers, artists, or music credited to anyone because NONE of them were used on this "film".

What this appears to be is a collection of screensavers, low-resolution graphics, some grainy stock footage, and 1980s-style computer text crawls with purposely choppy sound mixing while a troupe of A. I. 'text-to-speech' voices droll on about nonsense so disinteresting as to dare you to turn it off.

Which I eventually did after suffering 10 straight minutes of this, waiting for the movie to make some kind of point, and then fast-forwarding a bit just to see if THIS really was all that the "film" was... and it was.

Just more A. I. voices over bad graphics screen savers.

===-=== -- MY RATING SCALE -- ===-===

• 1. Reserved for Poorly Produced/Amateur Video
• 2. Utterly Terrible
• 3. Really Bad
• 4. Mediocre
• 5. Perfectly Average
• 6. Surprisingly Entertaining
• 7. Very Good
• 8. Incredibly Good
• 9. Exceptionally Great
• 10. Reserved for my Personal Favorites.

*** PREFACE: I may be the wrong audience to be leaving an opinion here, compared to the other first-time reviewers only gushing over it, but I wanted to touch on some thoughts about the actual story... ***

-- PSYCHOSoShal:

So right off the bat, I'm sorry, but the title is pretty meh. I don't even know how "Clickbait" has anything to do with the movie. You girls already had this perfect word you came up with that easily lent itself to any number of clever play-on-words titles sitting right in front of you with "SoShal". You could have gone with almost anything related to "Social _______" (The SoShal Experiment? SoShal Media Challenge?), the possibilities write themselves.

-- SoShal STANDING:

It was unconventional to say the least. Deftly produced as everything looked and sounded great and professionally put together, the lighting, the shot compositions, they all worked well... The dialogue however got a bit heavy with slogans, quotes, and influencer advice (which may have been apropos) but it all began to sound like fortune cookies to me.

Overall it reminds me of similar movies OCTOGAMES (2022) and FUNHOUSE (2019) which had similar plots, budgets, and a similar presentation of the "contest" with the use of a virtual host. Even the NPC SoShal workers felt indicative of SQUID GAMES, except because they came in different heights and wore their pants up high they reminded of those "Shy Guys" from Super Mario Bros., but with fencer masks.

And speaking of costuming, why did y'all have homegirl dressed up like one of those fortune teller machines (like from the movie BIG) the whole movie?

-- SoShal MEDIA INFLUENCE:

There is a lot about social media influencer culture that I'm just not familiar with, so I think movies like these would really benefit from having a proxy character for the audience to be introduced to things and how things work. A character who is discovering so the audience can discover (as commonly done in fantasy movies, card poker movies, science movies, stock trading movies) our own Neo in the Matrix.

Because as it stands I didn't quite get that these caricatures were indicative of what's popular on Youtube (LookLoop). Or why these characters were who best represented it.

I would've imagined in a story like this (and given what the villains were aiming to accomplish) it would've also included like an InstaModel, a self-important outrage media critic, a watch me eat stuff guy, a sexy try-on haul girl, and a conspiracy theorist as well. A whole gamut of "look at me" personalities.

-- SoShal ISSUES:

1. I didn't get how they all mostly knew of each other if they only had followings of 250K. Coincidence or convenience, but there are YouTubers with millions of followers that I either never heard of, or watch, or discovered years after everyone else did (and I loathe the day I learned what a Pewtipie was) so I can't imagine like Ron Tron, Lele Pons, Legal Eagle, the Corridor Crew, and Ryan George all just happening to be fans of one another (much less with smaller channels at just 250K subs).

2. I also didn't get what made the kid unboxing things channel be so believably popular. He seemed to be so disinterested in being in anything (including the movie itself) and had to have his mom feeding him lines to parrot the entire time like it's all still new to him. How would his fanbase not be put off by her disembodied voice constantly yakking off-camera like he's a ventriloquist dummy? How is that entertainment?

3. Also were all of their fanbases just sitting around online in empty virtual rooms waiting for them to randomly pop in to livestream record their 1-minute hostage videos? And with them filming these things side-by-side within earshot of each other, that is exactly what these videos would look like to any longtime fans of theirs.

4. Where would all of those new followers even come from and so suddenly if their uploads were being posted to each of their own hacked channels for their already existing audience? There was nothing mentioned about drawing in outside interest nor a hashtag from the start to encourage any crossover pollination from amongst each other's followings.

Actually that would've made more sense to have their live feeds simulcast across each others channels thus pooling all 6 of their 250K following into a potential 1.5 million net total.

-- LAST SoShal POINTS:

• WTF was on that eyeball? -
• LOL! The gun poking in/out of the cubby. -
• HUH? What happened to the rest of the Shy Guys? -
• HEY, the poster looks like the Looney Tunes "That's all folks!" background. -
• AND So what if some hacker deletes your faux-youtube account, it's 2024 and these are supposed to be successful influencers, wouldn't they have other social media accounts to fall back on if they had to restart their "YouTube" channel?

Well that's it for my 4 and a half cents and some change.

It's the same plot to TWISTER (1996) with many borrowed elements (unsigned divorce papers, rival teams, unique earthquake prediction model used correctly by one team and not by the other, and a third-wheel fiance) mixed with the usual bureaucratic government obstruction seen in every impending disaster film since JAWS (1975).

The special effects are surprisingly okay in parts, and not-so-much in many others. Jessica Morris does a decent job with her role, as well as a handful of others, but no one is helped by the scriptwriting. While it's not exactly SyFy movie bad, it very much feels like they were shooting off of a first draft that no one bothered to proofread.

-- SPLITTING HAIRS:

So with that out of the way, there are some mistakes I noticed while watching. Unlike the surprising majority of the other reviewers, I'm not from the state of Missouri yet I still couldn't help but notice something off with the use of locations in the film (not with their pronunciations as I didn't know, notice, and couldn't tell so that didn't bother me).

But rather then explain the oddity I have time-coded each mention of locales as they appear (with accompanying dialogue) for anyone reading to just see for themselves...

• (@ around 05 mins) TITLE CARD: New Madrid
• (@ around 08 mins) TITLE CARD: Sikeston. Mobile lab where the main characters operate out of is located at a small airport hanger here. Latest earthquake epicenter is "Two miles south of New Madrid." -
• (@ around 11 mins) Latest earthquake epicenter is in "New Madrid, south of Marston." **
• (@ around 28 mins) While the team is driving toward Marston to access the ex-husband's helicopter, Finn says, "Quakes are centered from the south, near Marston." .... "The epicenter is in Marston. Your sensor is sending you to the wrong spot!" -
• GOOF (@ around 30 mins) The location of the ex-husband's helipad in Marston is the EXACT SAME location the film used (@ around 08 mins) for Sikeston. -
• (@ around 32 mins) TITLE CARD: St. Louis. Team 1 plants the first sensor. -
• (@ around 42 mins) TITLE CARD: Sikeston. Brett's government response team lands to start drilling. -
• (@ around 43 mins) TITLE CARD: Nashville. Team 2 plants the second sensor. -
• GOOF (@ around 45 mins) TITLE CARD: Nashville. Team 3 plants the third sensor in what is supposed to be Memphis. -
• (@ around 54 mins) After successfully triangulating their censors they now know the epicenter is south of New Madrid. ***
• (@ around 1h 00 mins) Cami says, "Have Brett meet us in New Madrid." Why did she say that? -
• (@ around 1h 01 mins) Dan asks Cami, "How was New Madrid?" But when was she back in New Madrid? She was just in Jefferson City talking to the Governor and before that in (what was supposed to be) Memphis (even though the TITLE CARD said Nashville) -
• (@ around 1h 06 mins) The epicenter "...is at the fracking site in Marston, not Sikeston." ...Okay so sounds like it's in Marston again. ***
• (@ around 1h 06 mins) "We gotta get to Marston and stop Brett." But they have said repeatedly that Brett is in Sikeston. -

(** New Madrid is actually northeast of Marston. *** Unless you knew that Marston was located about 7 miles south of New Madrid, suddenly stating definitively that the epicenter is "south of New Madrid" just makes it sound like a whole new location.)

--- SPLITTING HEADACHE MOMENTS:

Right after each of the 3 sensors are planted there is a last minute mad scramble to run out and grab something just as the ground starts shaking. Three times. The movie does this same exact scenario three separate times, back-to-back-to-back: they plant the sensor, get to safety, a sudden earthquake knocks stuff over, then they run back out to save the sensor or retrieve an item scenario.

--- A BANANA SPLIT MOMENT:

LOL, a helicopter pilot is warned that they are about to fly into some telephone wires and he puts his arms over his head to brace himself before deciding to actually try piloting the chopper away from them.

===-=== -- MY RATING SCALE -- ===-===

• 1. Reserved for Poorly Produced/Amateur Video
• 2. Utterly Terrible
• 3. Really Bad
• 4. Mediocre
• 5. Perfectly Average
• 6. Surprisingly Entertaining
• 7. Very Good
• 8. Incredibly Good
• 9. Exceptionally Great
• 10. Reserved for my Personal Favorites.