inspektorr

On paper, it sounds intriguing. A big name director trying a completely new approach to haunted house horror, placing the audience in the seat of the poltergeist. Cool, right?

Well... The thing is that the POV approach gets very boring, very quickly. Turns out that limiting yourself to a single lens with a single wide angle field of view isn't the best choice when you have a whole film to make.

Now, there are movies that have done this before. In fact, there are movies that were entirely shot on GoPros - but those are POV combat action movies that have insane pacing and placing the viewer "in the front row" makes sense.

Here, your POV is mainly standing in the corner of the room or in the closet, peeking out at distant characters, or endlessly walking through the house, trying to get around furniture. Pair that with the fact that a lot of the shots are hand held and the fact that on more than one occasion you can see the unflattering corner wobble effect (a direct consequence of using a prosumer Sony A9III camera) it simply takes you out of the experience. Instead of being immersive, you end up being yanked out all the time.

For me personally, another huge issue is the lens choice itself. It's also just a basic Sony 14mm lens, which is totally fine for photography and weddings and stuff like that, but here it ends up looking... well, soapy. There's way too much depth of field and paired with the wide angle, the corner wobble and everything being in focus all the time, it just feels cheap, almost like a student film.

For the life of me I can't understand why Soderbergh didn't go for an anamorphic lens. There are prosumer wideangle anamorphics available, costing less than $1000 and I'm absolutely certain they would've provided way more cinematic experience.

When Lars Von Trier shot Festen on a handheld Sony mini-dv camera, it worked because it was appropriate, it felt like we were watching someone's family gathering home video. It helped with the authenticity. Using a wedding video camera setup here doesn't work, because it makes no sense and fails to connect us to the little action there is.

The story itself isn't bad. Yes, we don't get much in terms of character development and the dialogs are just barely passable, but the idea is good.

It's just a shame that Soderbergh's cornered himself with the POV gimmick. Cornered both allegorically and literally.

Look, plotwise, this is a bit of a stinker. There's no complexity here, no deep mistery or big reveals, it's basically just a cardboard plot built up just enough so it holds up. Barely. You really are expected to suspend all belief and abandon all logic.

The very setup is silly. Two people are left to guard a mysterious and dangerous gorge for a full year. Why two? Why not 4? Or 20? Well, just because!

Then follows a bit of bangs and booms, some goofing, some romance and a lot of stupid decisions made by allegedly world class professionals.

The visuals are so-so. The monsters aren't that good looking...

And despite all this, as a bit of brainless fun, I guess it's fine! Could've been so much more with a bit of better writing. Oh, both actors did a really good job with what they had.

I have no idea why some here are calling this a must-see masterpiece, because arguably it's neither of these things.

The main issue is that the movie is covering a news crew following the events of the famous Munich Olympics terrorist attack and kindapping of Israels team, but everything that's ACTUALLY interesting is happening outside of their studio. I don't care about fighting for "bird" time. Or endless shots of a director instructing the tech to switch from one camera to another. I mean, we do understand how TV editing works for god sake... I wan't to know what's happening with the hostages. And who are the terrorist. And what's the police doing. And even if the news editors don't know all of this, why can't we as viewers see it? It would make this movie so much engaging.

This is where the movie falls completely flat. No amount of dramatization can turn a standard busy TV network day into something special. It just can't because it's really not something special. I mean, this is a sports news team covering Olympics, so any day of the week is already stressful for them, as we see in the introduction.

And yeah, we get it, this was the first live news coverage of a terrorist attack and live TV network was in it's infancy so these guys kind of did some things for the first time... But, does that really deserve a feature film? Who cares about this stuff? I feel like this is the type of story you share with your TV buddies, reminiscing about "good old days", yadda, yadda... When you think about these horrible events, just about all other vantage points seem so much more important and more engaging, be it from the victims, the terrorists, the police, the government... Tv network covering this? Gimme a break.

If you wan't a much better film about these events and the consequences of these attacks just watch Munich from 2005, directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Eric Bana.