phenomynouss

Samantha, a young girl who was kidnapped, resurfaces after 15 years and is now being questioned (or possibly interrogated) by a Detective Green played by Dustin Hoffman....

...Is the movie premise we were baited with, only to have it mysteriously replaced with a completely disconnected story about an old Italian drunk working as a private investigator trying to find the kidnapper of Samantha in between his own suicide attempts. He is hated by the Italian cops and is constantly meddling in their own investigation.

This is the movie. Dustin Hoffman's scenes with Samantha only occasionally pop up to intrude but are completely disconnected from the Italian plot so entirely that it becomes a distraction.

Why are these two separate, barely connected storylines being played in the same movie? The only explanation for this comes at the very end and involves spoiling it. This is based on a novel but if you had told me this movie was written as an original screenplay with just the Italian portions, then they got ahold of Dustin Hoffman very late in production and decided to shoehorn him into the film long after the main film itself was done, I would believe it.

The problem is that none of the story elements are interesting on their own to justify this nonsensical twist. The movie is less about this case and disappearance and more about this drunken Italian bumbling about seemingly solving a completely different case from the one that was shown to us at the very beginning.

Since this was apparently adapted from a novel, I can only hope that there was some more interconnection between the two competing storylines, or at least both in the same language (the Dustin Hoffman scenes are all in English and the rest of the film is in Italian)

I was mildly intrigued starting this film , even as it felt a little too snarky-reddit in its humor , but it started to be fun once it got to the spaceship and Mickey's routine on it .

Then Mark Ruffalo swaggered into the film and began belting out one of the strangest but not wholly inaccurate Trump impersonations I've ever heard, more focused on that weird soft mumbling tone he uses in small groups.

Why was he doing this? It feels like it should have been obvious at first (he's described at the start as a failed politician who lost 2 elections and decided to fund a colonization mission instead) but when virtually nothing else in the film seems to be taking on any particular contemporary issue (the ethics of human cloning being a much more distant scifi type theme) the idea of this guy being a trump/musk stand-in was almost completely lost on me.

Except for the fact that every time he's on screen doing his rambling Trump impersonation, virtually everything else in the film grinds to a halt. It stops becoming a story of wacky Mickey 17 (with Robert Pattinson also putting on a weird voice) and becomes a huge distraction of "look at this wacky guy and his fast talking ways, so similar to someone you might have seen before, folks. So familiar, can you believe it? So similar"

Over time the similarities become even more blunt, to the point of being over the top absurd, especially as the character starts using blatantly eugenicist language about colonizing the new planet, and even a weirdly structured line where he calls it a "white planet" (its an ice world) that I had to rewind to hear again because it almost sounded like he meant "white" in the racial sense, although there is no contemporaneous style racism among the colonists.

A little more than half of the movie later the story suddenly stops becoming a study on Mickey 17 and his life as an "expendable" to be used and allowed to die to test conditions in their new colony before settling it with "normal" humans, and starts becoming a rather ordinary scifi action adventure piece involving the native creatures called "Creepers" and the standoff between them and the humans.

By the time the film reaches a big climactic stand-off near the end, with Mark Ruffalo continuing to smother every scene he's in with his Trump voice, it starts to become questionable exactly why this painfully unsubtle Trump impersonation (complete with adoring fans wearing red hats and a completely coincidental assassination attempt scene where ruffalo's character is just barely nicked ) is even necessary?

There's no real political statement being made here other than "Trump is so dumb, right? Look how stupid and dopey his followers are. Look how racist he is towards literal non-human creatures . Look at his weird wife obsessed with making sauces." Nothing about any of it speaks of anything beyond the most surface level "bad man talks funny and is annoying".

Despite being unconnected beyond proximity of release i sense a comparison to be made with "Andor", which released its final season around the same time, and which amazingly captured the true evil, lies, banality, and corrupting nihilism of fascism and the ugliness it unleashes on all its most loyal subjects starting from the top down.

By comparison, any statement being made about Trump or fascism in this film is about as superficial as a political cartoon of Trump wearing a diaper and being coddled by Putin. It smacks of the sort of "hashtag resist" moderate liberalism that did nothing in the face of Trump and saw its leaders open the door and welcome him back in when he abruptly won again in 2024 against all expectations and good sense.

But all of that can only be couched in an "if". If it's meant to be political , if it's meant to be a satire , if it's meant to be a commentary on Trump, because aside from the dopey Trump voice and red-hatted fans, and weird obsession with birthrates on a shiny new white planet, absolutely nothing is actually said or commented on about this guy other than "he's a dick"

It's still supposed to be Mickey's film but by the time it transitions to being about the Creeper crisis, he's relegated to being the token protagonist meant to move events along from point A to point C and back to point B, someone you could replace with Han Solo or Captain Kirk or John McClane or Batman and the only thing that would change is the style of snark he'd been dealing out in each scene.

After 24 hours, possibly after 24 days, the only thing about this film that still sticks with me is Mark Ruffalo's weird little Trump impersonation.

Inexplicably, the series uses AI generated voice recreation of Gabby Petito to read out loud the journal entries. Using an AI to recreate the voice of a murdered woman in a documentary about her murder is repulsive.

That completely takes me out of the whole thing and it was completely pointless. There was no reason to use it other than as a vulgar display of exploitative tech which is the exact kind of vibe you don't want to be giving off in a true crime documentary, already subject to widespread criticism about being exploitative.

Totally pointless. They absolutely knew what they were doing and would have done worse if were shameless enough.