Music

1 out of 5 stars.

Horrible film. Plot is bad. Acting is stale. Sia direction with an autistic person behavior is very misguided. Horrible film in general.

I am virtually unaware of the controversy surrounding this film so I'm not going to be harsh on it for the sake of it.

First this movie is boring and confused. It labels its self as a film about an autistic girl yet it seems to be more about her older sister. It is a film about the sisters romance and her job. The autistic character is just sort of in the background which really confused me.

The acting. It ranges from ok to an absolute disaster. I don't think this film had people with autism as consultants which they should have. When making a movie about a subject that is not something that you know of first had you should surround your self with people who do have first hand experience with the topic. This way you can create a honest, respectful movie. They should have cast autistic people, even if they are not the lead it would have been nice for a film like this to be more inclusive. I think one of the biggest issues is that they cast someone who isn't really an actor and isn't really that good.

The script was simultaneously boring yet a cluster of every idea and the kitchen sink. It had a heart under it all but it was just like jokey and not serious until the end and it was too late then.

The musical numbers are one of the biggest disasters of this films. It was wrote as a movie not a musical. Then they offered $10,000,000 to make it a musical and it is painful obvious. The music is literally just dumped on top of random scene. They must have looked at the script and been like "sod it just shove one there". Then the actual numbers were the cheapest things ever. Where did the money go? The costumes were so cheaply made and just bad. They looked like costumes from a school play. It was crazy to me.

I don't love it when people all jump on a movie just for the sake of it but this was really bad. Really really bad. The music was ok that's it.

I cant believe sia even released this. horrible depictions of people on the spectrum. i'm disgusted. i wish i could rate this movie even lower.

This movie makes me afraid for the future of autistic representation in media.

I was disappointed to find that Sia's directorial debut isn't the trainwreck everyone says it is. That's why I decided to check it out because of all the negative reviews. What exactly is everyone having a problem with? Apparently, the detractors all hate the lead performance and even invented terms like Autistic Blackface to describe it. They all treat this movie as if it were an affront to humanity because of this performance saying that it's degrading to autistic people. Well, I'm high functioning autistic and I expected to be offended but came away realizing the character Music is meant to be low functioning. She can't speak, only communicates in noises and wears headphones to filter out the noise of the world because she has sensitive hearing. Sure, this isn't my experience and it isn't the experience of a lot of autistic adults, and I think the filmmakers know this. This character is not meant to be a representation of every autistic person in the world. I get that and was okay with the movie.

Basically, what we get is a retread of the Tom Cruise/Dustin Hoffman classic Rain Man and while it isn't original, it does have some nice unique touches that make it interesting. I love the creative music video sequences that Music dreams up, her way of communicating with the world, her way of making sense of it. I also found this movie to have heart, and I totally believe that Sia did this as a labor of love and a tribute to a good friend of hers who has autism.

This isn't the worst film I've seen by a long shot and I think it just became popular to hate on this film as some misguided act of virtue signaling. The more egregious act has been all of these people getting offended by this film in my place.