k9gardner

The herky-jerky camera style that carries relentlessly throughout the entire film should be enough to tell anyone what they're in for. Yeah, it's like that. The fake documentary style with someone who literally cannot hold a camera still for one second in the entire 90-some minute film is so over the Blair Witch top that no one would mind if the makers were taken out back and dispatched accordingly. I hope they made no other films and are pumping gas somewhere in the Midwest. Don't worry, there are no spoilers here. You can't spoil spoiled milk, right?

Ok, here's the actual review:

There is nothing at all good about this film.

No good acting. No good plot. No good lines. No good character studies. No good acting. No good sequences, no good shots. There is nothing good about this film.

I'm not sure how these things happen. You've got a couple of capable actors here, so what do you with them? You give them a weak script, weaker dialog, a few chase scenes and shoot-em-up scenes, and call it a day? Doesn't seem fair. Could a decent director have salvaged this? I doubt it, but we'll never know. Clearly not much effort was made. It's just with a voice as distinctive as Neeson's, you've got to give him good lines. He can barely squeak out a sentence. So why have him give this long driveling self history to the reporter? And why was he even doing that? It doesn't fit at all with the previous character development. Add to the the vehicle going up the ramp and tipping over, the other vehicle bursting into flame on impact, and the fact that six machine guns never seem to be a match for one man with a pistol, and you get the sense of this movie. Really, really, bad. Not average. Bad. Skip it.

I know one critic's review ended with " White Noise has so much crammed into its two-and-a-quarter hours that it will take multiple viewings to unpack it all. Luckily, it's all so entertaining that the prospect of those multiple viewings is an enticing one indeed."

I disagree. There are many films that merit a second viewing. Or a first. This is neither. In trying to analyze what was so wrong with it, I was drawn to one of the "tidbits" here. It noted one departure from the DeLillo novel in that, in the novel, Babette did not get shot or go to the hotel or the hospital, and in the movie she did. I asked myself why they made that change, and how different the film would have been had they not made that change. My analysis is that it would not have appreciably changed the film. As an individual detail, it neither contributes to nor detracts from the film.

And then I started considering the other details, scenes, dialogs, characterizations, of the film, as to their individual contribution to the film. I feel that in each case, there were no observed details of the film that actually either detract from or contribute to the film.

In this way, it is somewhat holographic. Any section of the film contains the entirety of the film. The film is not a story, there's no action, there's no real goal or realization or conclusion. The whole thing is really just an existential moment.

Where I think the film fails, is that it exists. As a thought experiment, or an "I wonder what it would be like if they made a movie out of this," it might have been something good for a late night diner conversation among college students. But as a movie, spending what, $100M? To make a movie that would not gross a thousandth of that... I know some would think, "What do you care, it's not your money." But it is somebody's money, and, even though obviously everyone involved knew it would be a bust, almost deliberately, or by definition, they actually took it all the way from concept to distribution. Meanwhile, other film projects, or messages that could truly benefit from being presented through the medium of film, languish on the shelves, perhaps unread.

This is just silliness. But hey, I'm the guy who goes broke trying to help people less fortunate, to get a toehold in their lives. What do I know? How different am I from the filmmakers, who go broke trying to... what? I'm not sure what they're trying to do. Show the angst of the world today, via a film that is both the signifier and the signified? Is there a message there, or is it just an observation of self-observation? I don't know.

Near the end, I started checking to see how much time was left. First, it was 40 minutes. Then 32. Then 25, 17, 14. Then I figured I was close enough to the end that I stopped checking. I figured I would survive till the end. But... why put oneself through that? Unless you are a a DeLillo fan, which I guess I am not, I don't see the point of the two and a quarter hours to watch it. Just spend 5 minutes imagining what it would be like, and you'll probably nail it.