An average movie

To be honest, I wasn’t really sure what to expect from this flick but, since there was a pretty good cast involved and since it was available on Netflix, I thought I might as well check it out. On top of that, I really loved ‘Mr. Robot’ so it was pretty cool to see Sam Esmail’s next directorial project, especially with such a star-studded cast. In fact, you could say that this movie could be some kind of sequel or spin-off from his famous TV-show. But it also reminded me of some other TV-shows such as ‘The Twilight Zone’ and ‘Lost’. Anyway, I always had a weak spot for such mysterious paranoid thriller and this one was not bad at all. As mentioned before, there was a nice cast involved (Julia Roberts, Mahershala Ali, Ethan Hawke, Myha'la, Kevin Bacon) and they were all really solid here. It also helped that their respective characters were all fairly well developed. I especially could identify with Ethan Hawke’s character. Not that the guy was inspirational or heroic, in the contrary, but I’m pretty sure that, if a disaster would occur, on such a scale or even smaller, I would react pretty much the same way as he did which was rather daunting. What was also very well done with this movie was to show our dependence on technology, especially the internet. Indeed, if for some reason the internet would not work anymore, I’m pretty sure that our world would collapse, as displayed in this movie. Thanks to this tool, or because of it, we are constantly aware of what is going on around the corner but also at the other side of the world (at least, we think we do) but, if it would be gone, if we wouldn’t know anymore ‘everything’, pretty much like we used to be 30 years ago, we would be actually lost. It was also interesting that they focused on rich people but, at the end of the day, even if the world might be ending, their situation, as pointed out by Kevin Bacon’s character at some point, was probably the least dramatic, at least, on the short-term. Still, there were a few things that didn’t really work though. First of all, it was fine that you never got a clear explanation about what was going on. Indeed, any explanation would have been anti-climactic. However, in this case, there was no need to have such an extensive running time. Seriously, for more than 2 hrs, you get to see all these characters basically saying ‘What the hell is going on?!?’ on and on again and not much else after all. Another thing that bothered me was that some of the stuff going on was just too bizarre like each time the animals started to act weird. Sure, like ‘Lost’, it did amplify the whole eerie mystery but, also like ‘Lost’, it made the whole thing also terribly random and rather nonsensical. Anyway, to conclude, in spite of its flaws, it was still a decent watch and I think it is worth a look, especially if you like the genre.

6/10