Young Ones

This is a good movie. It looks good. It's interesting. It has a decent plot. It also has a few well defined characters, one of which is Ernest Holm, the father of two teenage children and the owner of a barren stretch of farm land turned desert. Holm is played by Michael Shannon in convincing fashion. He is determined without being unscrupulous. He is flawed yet humble enough to know it. He has convictions. He loves his family. This film reminded me of There Will Be Blood. The Daniel Day-Lewis movie is, of course, superior to this one although there is a similar perspective of harsh land and desperate men whose fates lie in their ability to coax wealth from it. The other major difference its that this is set in the near future and has the conceivable technological improvisations of a world where water has become the most rare commodity. All in all a pretty good movie well deserving of a much higher rating than it currently averages.

It almost feels like someone adapted Shakespeare to a movie set in the near future where the economy had gone to hell and the US is almost without water. The film is slow, really slow, so that in two hours you don't see much. Paradoxically, some of the important scenes are rushed through, while others, related to character emotions are prolonged.

To me it felt both as a well done movie and a boring one. The practical effects, the acting, the shots, they were all excellent. The pacing and the story, on the other hand, a bit disappointing. I guess you have to be in the mood and you have to like the technique of film rather than just look for a story to entertain you.

Bottom line: Hard to call it a bad movie in any context, but only part of the viewers will be glad to have seen it. Let it go at its own pace, watch it from start to end, try to grasp the vision of the writer/director. Hope it works for you.

Set in the future when water is hard to find a teenage boy sets out to protect his family and survive.

In a small way, this works as a companion piece to "Interstellar". Both are futuristic, science fiction movies that address a world consumed by drought. And both were released in 2014. That may be just about the only overlap, but it makes them a nice pair, and also makes me want to watch "Dune".

Somehow, though, this film never really grabs your attention. Elle Fanning is decent, and Kodi Smit-McPhee is a good actor (and a nice guy). Maybe this needed more Michael Shannon? He is, of course, among the best actors in the business today.

The movie doesn't add much to the sci-fi genre.But, the story can be interesting if you pay a lot of attention. That's one of the major problems with this movie: The story starts in a boring way making it a challenge to keep up watching but it changes it's paste when getting near to the end.At least, the actors did their best to show emotions(which are basically anger & revenge). What i liked a lot was that the movie shows many young actors with potential to make more interesting movies IF they still follow these same styles of films. I somehow feel that this movie could have been much more if the story was developed in a other way. In conclusion, i think this movie was not that bad but neither would i watch it again.

The plot: After a catastrophic drought, a man and his two teenaged children attempt to survive in a post-apocalyptic society.

I wanted to like this more than I did. Everything about it seems like it would appeal to me. The problem is that I got a bit bored during a few slower parts of the film as I waited for the predictable plot to catch up to where I knew it was going. That's not a deal-breaker, but the scenes were telegraphed rather overtly early on, and anyone who's familiar with this sort of story can probably predict most of the film after twenty minutes. That said, it successfully avoided several annoying clichés in post-apocalyptic films: cannibals, biker gangs, raping all the female characters, and characters who do more yelling than talking. I was glad to see a post-apocalyptic film that was more concerned with characters than gratuitous elements such as these. Don't get me wrong: I love gratuitous exploitation films, but it's nice to have something a bit more restrained every now and then.

I would hesitate to truly recommend this film to fans of post-apocalyptic science fiction. There's certainly much to enjoy if you're starved for good entries in that genre, but it's nowhere near as good as The Road, which was a near-masterpiece. Certainly, the mood and atmosphere of that film was missing, and if you're looking for a truly bleak and depressing story, you won't find it here. This is a more traditional Western story in which a family survives in a near-lawless frontier. If you're more a fan of Westerns than post-apocalyptic films, then I can see how you might enjoy this more than I did. Even so, I think that you'd be better served by watching old Sergio Leone films. You won't get robotic mules, but you'll get much better cinematography and pacing. I can't remember a time when I was ever bored in a Leone film.