The movie that most suffers in comparison to Silence is the other 2016 film by a prominent Catholic director set in the past about a young man (played by Andrew Garfield) who travels to Japan on a religious mission where he will face excruciating and painful tests of his faith—that being Mel Gibson’s Hacksaw Ridge.
I loved Hacksaw at the time, and still do—but at the same time, the comparison to Silence reveals its message to be so simple as…
There were two small moments in here that felt a tiny bit *off*, and I'd like to elaborate on them:
1) Mary, an attractive woman in her early 50s, has spent the first half of the movie flirting with Joe, her friend Gerri's much younger son. In "Autumn," Joe shows up with an (age-appropriate) girlfriend on his arm, a charming woman named Katie.
At this point, we know quite a bit about Mary's past (she's been divorced once, she later…
Surprisingly hopeful (particularly in a film with two suicide attempts and a DIY home abortion). "You're going forward, and I'm going backward." His refusal to give answers, as his characters are simply too young to know why they're doing the things they do. And the start of his assault on globalism (with all these Austrian teens studying Latin but dancing to crappy American pop songs).
The superior version of The White Ribbon.
JURASSIC WORLD is to the Hollywood blockbuster what FUNNY GAMES was to the horror/thriller film.
While Trevorrow's film is a novel idea, it's certainly not wholly unprecedented--Zack Snyder and Marc Forster attempted similar experiments with SUCKER PUNCH and QUANTUM OF SOLACE, both movies beloved by me but that failed to connect with audiences, as their Distancing Effect proved too great a burden for audiences to bear (in the latter example particularly, Forster's formal radicalism was mistaken for ineptitude). Trevorrow overcomes…
