thechair

It's nice to see so many superlatives for what is undoubtedly a well crafted, well acted and nicely shot film, but for me it just didn't reach those same heights.

For the subject matter - and I did not know this was a true story, albeit being aware of the late 20th Century dictatorships here, in Chile and in Argentina - I found it a little too reserved for my emotional buttons to be pushed. Realism has it's place, particularly in a verité sense, but for the most part this was a film where everybody went about their very domestic business in a manner that left me a little disengaged. I can only recall one scene where the main character even raised her voice. And I get it, that's what she was like, and 2hrs 18 mins of frantic searching and shouting would have been annoying, but it made for a slightly dulled experience.

It is also, like many modern films, too long for the story content as laid out.

So yeah, not bad, quite interesting, nice to look at, but I wouldn't want to watch it again.

I was close to giving this a 7 and in truth it's about a 6.4 as the current aggregate score suggests rather than a straight 6. From the outset the skill of the filmmakers is evident. It looks gorgeous in monochrome and I was anticipating something special. Within twenty minutes, though, I was wondering if the whole thing was a very clever joke, as the central character, an expressionless plank of wood straight from a Robert Bresson film (he is name checked), drifts around aimlessly, talking about what film means with various free-thinking characters, and trailing after an even bigger snob than himself. It's how one imagines French film if pulling only on stereotype. A parody. To be fair, if the main character wasn't such a boring dud I think I would have loved it, but he is, so I didn't. Not awful, though. Glad I saw it.

Where are the high reviews coming from? How does this even earn a 6.3 score? The meta nature might have made a good episode back in the old days but in the old days Red Dwarf was also a comedy. There is nothing funny in this. It's just awful. The worst rehash/reboot I have ever seen. Sacrilege. I'd rather watch The Phantom Menace over and over. Or Highlander 2. Or even, despair on despair, Superman IV.

Some have rightly complained about the lack of canned laughter but maybe even a sound effect can't be coaxed into going along with this travesty.

I've watched it as all episodes are on iPlayer now and I've revisited from the beginning but they shouldn't have bothered purchasing these from Dave. I would have been a happier viewer stopping at the original 8.