What do you think of this recent movie?

I saw it last night and honestly I am still processing everything because movies have this weird power where they change your brain chemistry for like forty-eight hours straight and then you just carry that feeling around until something else overwrites it which is kind of what happened to me in the third grade when my teacher read us a book about space travel and suddenly every night before bed I was calculating orbital mechanics in my sleep even though I could barely do long division at the time which feels like such a specific childhood experience where media shaped your entire internal monologue for years and then you grow up and realize how much of who you are is just echoes of things you consumed as a kid like that one song that makes you cry for no reason or a smell that sends you back to 1998 and it is wild because we think we choose our interests but really most of them were planted in us by movies and books and songs before we knew what an opinion even was so when I say this movie moved me I am actually saying it connected with something that someone else put inside my head a decade ago which is both beautiful and terrifying depending on how you look at it.

I watched it last night and honestly wasn't sure what to make — the cinematography is stunning but I found myself wanting more substance in the second act. The soundtrack carried a lot of the emotional weight for me though, which is always something worth noting about these kinds of films.

Maybe it plays better as a rewatch where you can catch all the layers?

The pacing in the second act is where it loses me. The first 40 minutes build incredible tension, but then the film keeps pausing for these extended conversation scenes that don't move anything forward emotionally — they just repeat what we already know

I didn't really have time to see it before yesterday but my friend says the cinematography is stunning and honestly I can get behind that regardless of how much I agree with the script because visual storytelling has always been my favorite aspect of cinema — there was this one film by a director who used exclusively natural light and the way the shadows fell across faces in the third act made me weep without any dialogue at all which is what great movies do, they make you feel something visceral without overexplaining. Speaking of feeling things I had a really weird experience once where I went to see this underground screening at an old church basement — those seats were wooden and unpadded and there was some kind of incense burning in the back that smelled like rosemary or maybe pine but it's hard to say because you don't smell everything when you're sitting still for two hours. The projector kept flickering which annoyed everyone except me because I thought it added to the texture, though my neighbor kept asking what happened with his ticket and he was being very loud about it while a woman was trying to sleep behind him in row four who looked like she had been through something serious based on her expression. Anyway point is that movies are emotional experiences first and technical evaluations second because everything else can be learned from a review but the feeling they leave you with is yours alone.

I'll be honest — I didn't write anything down while watching but the score stood out to me more than the actual script did, which is a weird tell about how good the writing was or wasn't. The final act felt rushed compared to the first hour where they were actually letting scenes breathe. Not bad, maybe 6/10 — definitely worth seeing on a big screen even if it doesn't hold up as a rewatch.

I actually liked it more than I expected to! The cinematography was great but I'm still a bit split on the ending — felt like they left too many questions hanging, though I guess that's subjective.