THE UNIVERSE'S SILLIEST SOLDIER

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the movie feels like it was more focused on being a good MOVIE than a good STORY. the pacing and visuals are amazing, and this movie is on paper incredibly high-concept. not to mention how well it keeps your interest. it by all accounts SHOULD be a good movie overall. but it just. Isnt. its like some fundamental core thread got pulled out somewhere in the writing, and that unravels the whole thing.

for one, i WOULD say the alien sci-fi shit is all a very loving homage to crash hoaxes, alien/government interaction conspiracies, and abduction myths of all kinds from all the way back in the 40s to now. however, the way theyre implemented is, unfortunately, very boring and cliche. the effect is amplified to anyone who watches sci-fi regularly, or anyone who had a special interest in urban legends and conspiracy theories. theyre very run of the mill at heart, and a lot of the concepts arent really connected to each other in the film. they are almost entirely reliant on you already having that cultural baseline knowledge, along with some fully requiring a really high suspension of disbelief. i understood almost every reference in the movie and still found them boring and kinda nonsensical.

additionally, the core theme isnt nearly built up as much as it should be. there is clearly a lot this movie WANTS to say about empathy, religion, human nature, and the right to information. the only aspect of this movie that builds on those themes is jane. janes plotline is by far the strongest, as it contains the best sci-fi element, the best scene, and the best thematic beats. and i need to state for the record that i am not christian, and am in fact avidly anti-christian and anti-church due to how warped the religion is in the modern day. to get me to care about a christian womans moral crisis, centered on her religion, is an accomplishment, and one very well earned.

jane has a point that humans are creatures that desperately seek a belief in something bigger than them, and brings up a valid concern about how confirming the existence of aliens might damage humanitys perception of itself and the world. she has a genuinely good moral dilemma about whether its right to release the footage, knowing it will change everything, and risk the entire collapse of human society. she also directly interacts with the main villain more than anyone in this movie, and he uses her internal dilemma to manipulate her into almosf killing someone that she seems to genuinely care about.

despite christianity being the focus, a lot of her dilemma is actually very religiously neutral, grounded in the role of religion in human culture and self-perception; even the outright christian stuff is centered on the parts of christianity i actually respect, the love thy neighbor & unquestioned acceptance of others shit from the Actual Bible that 70% of christians actively ignore. the call with the nun feels a little stilted, and certain lines a little contrived, but they still effectively communicate the message that the movie wants you to hear. you still believe it when she chooses to help reveal the truth at the end of the movie. you still Give A Fuck.

somehow, this movie is not about jane. she is only present in what felt like roughly one third of the movie. after which she disappears, outside of the single phone call to the nun, up until the literal end of the film. she takes the thematic weight of ALL of that with her.

every other character in this film is a vessel for the shit thats happening.

the biggest failing of this film is a simple inability to provide one good reason why we should give a fuck about 90% of the characters. they do not give us enough material to care about david, or margaret, or margarets shitty boyfriend, or hugo, or the main villain. the details that we are given about their lives and their goals are few, and superficial if you look at them too closely. there are a few too many blank spots that the movie wants you to fill in yourself, in some really awkward places where they lessen the emotional impact dramatically. this movie seems determined to only provide payoff to the things it wants YOU to build up in your imagination. the movie does barely does any of the work besides planting the concept in your brain.

"but crow," i hear you say. "isnt the whole point of art to be interpreted?? isnt it the hallmark of a good story to not answer every question or spoonfeed your audience, and trust that they can put the pieces together themselves??"

my answer to that is yes, that is absolutely true. a good story doesnt need to tell you everything. i personally LOVE when a story doesnt tell you everything or explain itself. however, this doesnt work out well as the structure of every single thing you choose to build your emotional and thematic cores around. the film mentions a thing a few times, does not build upon it in any depth, and then expects us to react appropriately as if they had actually given us any further information. it does this for the entire run time, and with half of the plot threads in the movie. the exceptions are daniel and janes relationship, and janes moral dilemma. partially exempt are the plotline of margaret being terrified of what was happening to her, the reveal of daniel being an experiencer, and margarets rocky relationship with her shitty boyfriend.

we are not given any reason to give a single flying fuck about daniel, margaret, hugo, or the main fucking villain outside of what happens onscreen in the movie. we are supposed to care about their backstories, but never are we given a reason to.

daniel basically doesnt exist before he went to jail. going to jail is barely something that matters to him, seemingly, because it functions mainly as a footnote explaining why he was hired by the organization. he clearly cares about jane, which is the most well-built aspect of his character, but they do not interact once after they split up. jane gets mentioned a couple of times when transitioning from The Part Of The Movie With Jane to The Part Of The Movie Without Jane, but she gets quickly forgotten by the movie rushing to make us care about the connection between daniel and margaret. the movie fails to make us care about it.

margaret is built up really well in regards to her clearly trying to avoid past trauma and how it leaves her unable to settle, talk about it, or later confront the memory of her abduction due to its proximity to whatever happened with her dad. she is, however, so determined not to talk about her childhood, that outside of the (awkwardly implemented) dialogue during her panic attack, we learn literally nothing about the trauma she is trying to avoid. it holds no weight. i dont care.

the main villain is CLEARLY someone they want us to empathize with. he was betrayed by hugo, has a dead wife, and seems to genuinely believe that he is protecting the world by hiding this information. they want him to be a thematic parallel to jane SOOOO badly. they consistently fail to deliver on why we should care. we learn nothing about his dead wife. we learn nothing about his grief. we learn nothing about his internal world at all.

hugo is by far the biggest victim of this "planting an idea and never watering it" kind of writing. we dont know anything about his connection to the main villain guy, we dont know anything about his connection to villain guys dead wife. we know he was """connected""" to the aliens somehow, and helped one escape, but we are given no elaboration on that connection or why the aliens matter personally to hugo. or why any of this matters to hugo. he feels like he is just supposed to be the wise, intelligent, enlightened older black man that knows everything oh hello morgan freeman typecast.

actually correction, the worst victims of this writing issue are actually jackson and the guy who asks scanlon* "why arent you stopping her?!" because i genuinely did not realize they might actually be intended to be or benefit from being actual characters and not just tropes written in to fill shoes.

this lack of elaboration or reason to give a shit can make a lot of the important emotional scenes of the movie come across as very corny or just straight-up forced at times. a good example is the scene at the end where people all over the world are shown silently glued to their phones, it would have been an insanely good sequence if it had enough build-up. most times though, you just barely know what the fuck youre supposed to be taking away from this movie. you can pick out everything it wants to say on paper but you feel genuinely nothing about it. this movie has some highly creative and magnificent scenes, and a really strong opening and enough layers that you could dissect it for years, but it fails to at any point give you a reason to go that far. it just expects you to think about it for the next five years instead of earning that sort of fascination.

its honestly disappointing, because this feels like something that would hit like crack for me if it was a little more weighty. i love movies that force you to think them through to understand everything. theres just too little put down to actually understand or think about. its a movie that went into itself already expecting to be acclaimed for its depth and artistry and to be discussed to hell and back for the next decade. it knows what its trying to be but doesnt work as hard as it probably should have to reach that status. its sad.

also the cgi that they use for anything thats supposed to be alive in this movie is uncanny in the worst way possible. like genuinely uncomfortable to look at and at some points even look ai generated. works interestingly on the animals and the alien but immediately falls apart when used on the fucking children in the flashback scene. genuinely unpleasant to watch and pulled me out of the scene enough that i couldnt even pretend to get invested in it. which is tragic since it was clearly trying to be hugely emotional. also also i like how they picked the two most alien-headed human actors they could find to play daniel and margaret. that was a nice touch. i enjoyed that.

tldr: good movie, its interesting, but not really good at getting you invested. told my friend i gave it a generous 3.5 stars in the car.