dirkmeilink

Today I logged on to IMDb - driven by an unstoppable force, set in motion by watching this film. As I endured the continuous onslaught of scenes that 'Alternate Ground' provides - I felt truly challenged to imagine a more horrifying mixture of desultory acting and zealless camera-work.

What made it a truly exceptional experience for me, was actually coming here to write the above, and seeing this title has in fact won 13 awards.

This film fully opened my eyes to the exciting new depths the bar has apparently been lowered. So thrilled to see what the future still holds!

(How I wish the Mayans had been right about 2012...)

The only horrifying aspect of this horror, is that the acting performance -of pretty much everyone but the lead, Laura- can apparently be poor enough to make you not even notice how awful the writing actually is.

I feel it's entirely plausible, if not to be expected, that a 12 year old submitting this as their AV-homework would subsequently fail the class. It's the umpteenth disfigured afterbirth created in the attempt to needlessly evolve the found footage genre. 'Intervention' depicts the most civil, insanely well organised, crystal clear videoconference over a buffer-free and flawless connection, where -for the entire agonising duration closing in on two hours- not a single person gets interrupted. Ever.

It's this lack of any connection with reality, a theme recurring far too many times, that ultimately makes the film rather painful to sit through. The acting isn't particularly horrendous, the storyline not unacceptable, the character progression no travesty; it's the liberties taken that simply scream "This will do fine." It's the utterly and clearly mechanical movement of the mouse indicator on the main character's screen, and expecting it not to be noticed. It's the scene showing all video-chatters vehemently pondering the origin of 'an arm in a photograph', and the main character not noticing the exact same tattoo on the full length of her own entire bare forearm. There are numerous scenes containing a face-palm-worthy discordance between this seemingly hasty, sloppy filmmaking and the frame of reference of anyone alive.

Unless you thoroughly enjoy making glottal noises at a film less realistic than the sun in Teletubbies, it'll likely be best to refrain from watching 'Intervention'.