Disclaimer: this is all just my opinion. Spoilers.
I saw this movie awhile back, went in without knowing anything about it and holy shit did I not enjoy it. There IS a great movie in there somewhere, but it was executed so poorly it never came through.
There are so many things wrong with it on every level and it's absolutely evident that it's thanks to amateur directing. The screenplay is bad and full of throwaway characters spouting weak lines like, "I guess love really is blind!" The editing is choppy and weird, and it's clear many of the scenes should have gone through a few extra takes so the actors could properly enunciate. The entire second act sags under the most melodramatic dialogue I have heard in a Hollywood film in years. Characters talk at one another, not to one another. Plot points that are set up from early on are entirely dropped. There is a brutally violent rape scene that came out of nowhere and feels wholly unnatural and unnecessary. The ending is nowhere close to being earned, and the big bad guys are introduced within the last 20 minutes of the movie and dealt with swiftly. There are strange red herrings and weird connecting threads that make zero sense. I think the screenplay desperately needed some extra treatment.
But the worst part has to be the treatment of the Native American actors in the movie. It's supposed to be a film about the plight of their people in the US, but instead we see the story from the perspective of two white people -- one a fish out of water who is given zero time to develop why she cares about the dead girl, and another whose only ties to the reservation is the fact that he knocked up a Native. The Native actors receive one of three treatments: they exist to be the wise old Indian, to be unceremoniously killed, or to constantly remind the white audience that everything they do is related to their ancient culture -- painting on a death mask, etc. We don't get to see them as people, and we never truly believe the movie takes place on this bleak reservation because of the unfortunate lack of establishing shots.
Incredibly disappointing. My wife and I discussed it for hours afterward because it was just that much of a let down.
Edit: Adding this. It really felt like a made-for-TV movie. Yet whenever I've brought this up with people, they immediately jump to "This movie was good because it brought attention to how shitty conditions are on the reservation." Or, "You just don't like it because they cast two white people." Or, "This movie brought attention to the problem of missing native women!"
To the first one, there are better movies out there about reservations, and I felt like we hardly even got establishing shots making us feel like we were actually ON a reservation. Just middle-class interiors and one fucked up trailer that, like my wife said, feels like any other junkie house would feel.
To the second and third point together, why are we seeing this story through these two white characters' perspectives if its actually about the plight of native people? Also, the girl was never missing, the first scene of the movie we see what happened to her and they find her before anyone knew she was gone. Tacking on the message at the end about missing girls seemed out of nowhere and unrelated. Like a movie about cancer with a scrawl at the end about how bad the AIDS epidemic has gotten.
I could go on and on. But again, everyone seems to be enjoying it a lot and that's fine. I did really like Sicario and Hell or High Water, so I'm happy for this guy to get more work.
Submitted September 04, 2017 at 03:39AM by dunnsk http://ift.tt/2vEtb4q
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