A good movie

To be honest, I wasn’t really sure what to expect from this flick but, since it was directed by Kathryn Bigelow and since it was available on Netflix, I thought I might as well check it out. Well, eventually, I wasn’t bothered by the fact that they kept repeating the same events from a different perspective and I wasn’t bothered by the abrupt ending. The only thing that really annoyed me was the fact that the movie was advertised as being around 112 mins when, in fact, you had almost 15 mins of end-credits, so I was expecting the whole thing to go a little bit further than it did. Anyway, Bigelow delivered another tense, even nightmarish, thriller and, even though it might have been frustrating for some viewers because of the reasons I explained above, I thought it was equally fascinating and terrifying to behold. Even though some viewers deemed the format to be redundant, I really disagreed. Indeed, in my opinion, it was really interesting to see who were actually all these people involved in this conference call and what were they actually doing during this crisis. It was also pretty strong to see that, even though most of them were some highly qualified professionals who trained their whole life for such an event, they were also some actual human beings who were deeply affected emotionally by what was going on. I have to admit that they could have spent slightly more time with each character as we barely got the chance to get to know any of them. Anyway, the whole thing was so depressing because it seemed to be so realistic. At the end of the day, the US (but also the other Western countries as, right now, all the countries in the EU are massively ramping up their defense budgets) have spent so much money, so many resources and so many talented people to supposedly protect themselves but, as pointed out by several characters, the whole system is actually total madness. That’s why the ending was actually really good because, no matter the outcome, we will all loose if such a bomb might ever fall on the US and this idea, which has never been more real since the end of the cold war, is beyond frightening. To conclude, even if it was still missing something, it was a really solid hyper realistic thriller and it is definitely worth a look, especially if you are interested in Kathryn Bigelow’s work. 

7/10