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12 Angry Men
WHY'D I WATCH IT?
12 Angry Men
Drama / English / 1957
WHY'D I WATCH IT?
I've been in a BIG HONKIN' ARGUMENT with Yoda about objective morality, empirical evidence, GOD, lots of big word stuff. Anyway, it's made me very interested to see this kind of debate in the movies he watches. The 50s Countdown has had people throwing "12 Angry Men" back and forth a few times and wasn't that on Yoda's favorites list?
OH! It's his number one. A favorite shared by ScarletLion, Spaghetti, DrSoup007, Horroist, and even Jackojacko2000.
And it's about a jury arguing over a court case? PER~FECT!
WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
OH! It's his number one. A favorite shared by ScarletLion, Spaghetti, DrSoup007, Horroist, and even Jackojacko2000.
And it's about a jury arguing over a court case? PER~FECT!
WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
WELL.
Ummm...
It's just a great ****in' movie.
I was honestly surprised, AGAIN, I rarely watch black and white movies and I don't know any of these actors, seen anything else by this director, hadn't the plot spoiled for me, totally blind and I thought it was good. Really good.
I mean I hate courtroom drama (what don't I hate, right?), but this obfuscates out all of that petty legal system ******** and just presents 12 guys, all sitting in a room, a situation on which to make a judgment on.
Sure enough, 11 of them are for the guilty verdict except 1 (for predictable dramatic effect of course) and the rest of the movie is an intellectual dispute in an effort to overturn this certainty.
This concept definitely appeals to me, BUT NATURALLY I have to be very critical of how it's presented, if for no other reason than critical accuracy is precisely the point of the movie.
Did the arguments make sense? YES! THEY DID! It does look to be an open and shut case at the beginning and even by the halfway point where only half of the room is in agreement I WAS STILL ON THE FENCE RIGHT THERE WITH THEM! If we're all sharing the same information we should all be in agreement, but if there is still left unsaid and the collective is unsure then I should ALSO be unsure.
And in the end, I was convinced there was reasonable doubt!
BUT, they could have also ****ed this up by failing to present crucial information to the viewer before this point (so they can, "Surprise! New evidence!" and they did that once early on with the knife, but whatever it was a good stinger). Sure, the jurors reach new conclusions not previously considered, but all significant evidence is laid out for us right away so we can pick it apart along with them.
Admittedly, it's not a terribly surprising movie, all the arcs you would expect to see are here, but I had big grin on my face every time some ******* got called out for his ********.
AAAGGGHHHHH~that's satisfying.
Another impressive thing about this movie is that not only are the whopping cast of 12 characters nameless, but they each, ALL OF THEM, manage distinct separate personalities. They all seem like PEOPLE and some of them, particularly Henry Fonda and Lee J. Cobb have quite a presence to them.
It's just a very well-made minimalist drama with a couple neat little touches (anyone else glean the fan starting to work when it's matched 6 to 6 as "the winds of change"?) and manages to be equal parts emotionally charged and insightful.
NOW FOLLOWS MY COMPLAINTS:
But let's be real, I can only nitpick at this point.
When the rain kicks in we get a got of annoying background ambiance that while it doesn't make it too difficult to hear the characters, it's sufficiently loud enough to be distracting.
Some of the dialog between characters outside of the debate seems like needlessly feeble exposition like it's trying to squeeze everything it can out of each character, even though it's comparatively trivial next to the regular dialog.
The "prejudice" scene really caught me off guard because the theme was brought up before, and now it seems really uncharacteristic for so many people to react so acutely to it. Upon rewatching it, it's a bit easier for me to understand since he is saying some pretty objectionable things even by the standards of our other "antagonists", but it still sticks out to me.
PROBABLY because of my biggest issue with the movie which is the maddeningly immersion-breaking habit of so many characters standing up out of their chair and wandering around the room.
Maybe if one character was fidgety or another just didn't like sitting in general I can get that, but it's like half of the cast cannot stand to sit at the same table with somebody they disagree with and it's on principal that they stand up in a huff and walk away.
It just seems so unnatural that I couldn't help but focus on it. They must have been desperate to put some sort of movement into each shot to keep things visually interesting, but I'd have preferred that they just sat down and stayed sitting, or stayed standing, JUST MAKE UP THEIR ****IN' MINDS!
REWATCH UPDATE:
So I've watched this three times now and while my original complaints are hardly mitigated and I've even found new things I can criticize (some obvious points are drawn out unnecessarily, a couple performance stumbles, the last break period is a definite, albeit brief, lull), I've come to appreciate other aspects of it more, particularly how Cobb's character is foreshadowed.
He makes a brief overlookable comment about kids implying his bias at the beginning of the movie which is followed shortly by his primary introduction in which he articulately presents himself as "Now I have no personal feelings about this, these are just the facts..." which is a great little deceit. Later on when he offers his story, his most obvious piece of foreshadowing is pretty negligible. It obviously seems important in the moment but it occurs so early in the movie and he doesn't really even particularly stand out among all the other detractors for quite a while that there's no obvious sign that it'll be reincorporated later, particularly thanks to all the other moments where the characters interact and reveal a little bit about themselves. I STILL DON'T LIKE those scenes because they're transparently unimportant by the end of the movie, but if they were added to obfuscate this foreshadowing then I can at least understand why they're there.
Ultimately as much as crime solving may be an interesting idea for a movie, it doesn't appear to be the purpose of this movie. We never see the defendant again after the opening and really the movie neither seems to be about the characters themselves or the legal process. It seems to be about nothing less than the value of rationality in the pursuit of justice.
We have a sort of Inception moment partway through the movie where Fonda's character, Davis (he's one of maybe 3 characters ever named, but not referred to by name), is in the bathroom and another character asks him, "What if you convince all of us he's innocent and he really did do it?"
That's a good question, what if he really did do it? Reasonable doubt is not proof, so even if everybody sides Not Guilty, it's still possible the kid committed the crime and gets away with it.
The movie never explores this question, but perhaps because the answer should be reasonable to infer given the course of reasoning offered to us? Okay, let's say he did it: What does that mean?
It doesn't mean he'll kill again. It doesn't mean he didn't feel bad about it. It doesn't even mean the murder wasn't justified. All it means is that a criminal wasn't punished.
The inverse of that is an innocent who is punished.
Not punishing a criminal isn't an inherent moral wrong, it's a neutral judgment. If the punishment is death then it's a crime we are committing which is morally excusable. It's not morally "good" to put criminals to death, but it's not morally "bad" either, SO LONG... as the criminal in question is actually guilty and deserving of that level of judgment.
That's what's in question here. Davis begins the movie with no hard evidence to suggest the kid's innocence, but circumstances provoke him to question the fairness of such a verdict. Maybe he is guilty, but is he guilty a crime worth killing him for?
Even if none of that were in question though, the original question still remains an important one: What if he's guilty and he gets away with it?
Well, then that presents us a new conundrum: Which is worse? To give a killer a second chance or to condemn an innocent to death?
I think the implications speak for themselves: What we have to lose letting a killer go free is indefinite, and while it could potentially prove far more disastrous than one innocent death, one innocent death is precisely a consequence we can be certain of if we make the wrong decision. And even then it begs the question of whether condemning innocents can even be justified given a certain outcome.
What sort of justice is that?
Anyway I'll shut up now. My new rating for 12 Angry Men is 5 out of 5.
Final Verdict: [Friggen' Awesome]
Ummm...
It's just a great ****in' movie.
I was honestly surprised, AGAIN, I rarely watch black and white movies and I don't know any of these actors, seen anything else by this director, hadn't the plot spoiled for me, totally blind and I thought it was good. Really good.
I mean I hate courtroom drama (what don't I hate, right?), but this obfuscates out all of that petty legal system ******** and just presents 12 guys, all sitting in a room, a situation on which to make a judgment on.
Sure enough, 11 of them are for the guilty verdict except 1 (for predictable dramatic effect of course) and the rest of the movie is an intellectual dispute in an effort to overturn this certainty.
This concept definitely appeals to me, BUT NATURALLY I have to be very critical of how it's presented, if for no other reason than critical accuracy is precisely the point of the movie.
Did the arguments make sense? YES! THEY DID! It does look to be an open and shut case at the beginning and even by the halfway point where only half of the room is in agreement I WAS STILL ON THE FENCE RIGHT THERE WITH THEM! If we're all sharing the same information we should all be in agreement, but if there is still left unsaid and the collective is unsure then I should ALSO be unsure.
And in the end, I was convinced there was reasonable doubt!
BUT, they could have also ****ed this up by failing to present crucial information to the viewer before this point (so they can, "Surprise! New evidence!" and they did that once early on with the knife, but whatever it was a good stinger). Sure, the jurors reach new conclusions not previously considered, but all significant evidence is laid out for us right away so we can pick it apart along with them.
Admittedly, it's not a terribly surprising movie, all the arcs you would expect to see are here, but I had big grin on my face every time some ******* got called out for his ********.
AAAGGGHHHHH~that's satisfying.
Another impressive thing about this movie is that not only are the whopping cast of 12 characters nameless, but they each, ALL OF THEM, manage distinct separate personalities. They all seem like PEOPLE and some of them, particularly Henry Fonda and Lee J. Cobb have quite a presence to them.
It's just a very well-made minimalist drama with a couple neat little touches (anyone else glean the fan starting to work when it's matched 6 to 6 as "the winds of change"?) and manages to be equal parts emotionally charged and insightful.
NOW FOLLOWS MY COMPLAINTS:
But let's be real, I can only nitpick at this point.
When the rain kicks in we get a got of annoying background ambiance that while it doesn't make it too difficult to hear the characters, it's sufficiently loud enough to be distracting.
Some of the dialog between characters outside of the debate seems like needlessly feeble exposition like it's trying to squeeze everything it can out of each character, even though it's comparatively trivial next to the regular dialog.
The "prejudice" scene really caught me off guard because the theme was brought up before, and now it seems really uncharacteristic for so many people to react so acutely to it. Upon rewatching it, it's a bit easier for me to understand since he is saying some pretty objectionable things even by the standards of our other "antagonists", but it still sticks out to me.
PROBABLY because of my biggest issue with the movie which is the maddeningly immersion-breaking habit of so many characters standing up out of their chair and wandering around the room.
Maybe if one character was fidgety or another just didn't like sitting in general I can get that, but it's like half of the cast cannot stand to sit at the same table with somebody they disagree with and it's on principal that they stand up in a huff and walk away.
It just seems so unnatural that I couldn't help but focus on it. They must have been desperate to put some sort of movement into each shot to keep things visually interesting, but I'd have preferred that they just sat down and stayed sitting, or stayed standing, JUST MAKE UP THEIR ****IN' MINDS!
REWATCH UPDATE:
So I've watched this three times now and while my original complaints are hardly mitigated and I've even found new things I can criticize (some obvious points are drawn out unnecessarily, a couple performance stumbles, the last break period is a definite, albeit brief, lull), I've come to appreciate other aspects of it more, particularly how Cobb's character is foreshadowed.
He makes a brief overlookable comment about kids implying his bias at the beginning of the movie which is followed shortly by his primary introduction in which he articulately presents himself as "Now I have no personal feelings about this, these are just the facts..." which is a great little deceit. Later on when he offers his story, his most obvious piece of foreshadowing is pretty negligible. It obviously seems important in the moment but it occurs so early in the movie and he doesn't really even particularly stand out among all the other detractors for quite a while that there's no obvious sign that it'll be reincorporated later, particularly thanks to all the other moments where the characters interact and reveal a little bit about themselves. I STILL DON'T LIKE those scenes because they're transparently unimportant by the end of the movie, but if they were added to obfuscate this foreshadowing then I can at least understand why they're there.
Ultimately as much as crime solving may be an interesting idea for a movie, it doesn't appear to be the purpose of this movie. We never see the defendant again after the opening and really the movie neither seems to be about the characters themselves or the legal process. It seems to be about nothing less than the value of rationality in the pursuit of justice.
We have a sort of Inception moment partway through the movie where Fonda's character, Davis (he's one of maybe 3 characters ever named, but not referred to by name), is in the bathroom and another character asks him, "What if you convince all of us he's innocent and he really did do it?"
That's a good question, what if he really did do it? Reasonable doubt is not proof, so even if everybody sides Not Guilty, it's still possible the kid committed the crime and gets away with it.
The movie never explores this question, but perhaps because the answer should be reasonable to infer given the course of reasoning offered to us? Okay, let's say he did it: What does that mean?
It doesn't mean he'll kill again. It doesn't mean he didn't feel bad about it. It doesn't even mean the murder wasn't justified. All it means is that a criminal wasn't punished.
The inverse of that is an innocent who is punished.
Not punishing a criminal isn't an inherent moral wrong, it's a neutral judgment. If the punishment is death then it's a crime we are committing which is morally excusable. It's not morally "good" to put criminals to death, but it's not morally "bad" either, SO LONG... as the criminal in question is actually guilty and deserving of that level of judgment.
That's what's in question here. Davis begins the movie with no hard evidence to suggest the kid's innocence, but circumstances provoke him to question the fairness of such a verdict. Maybe he is guilty, but is he guilty a crime worth killing him for?
Even if none of that were in question though, the original question still remains an important one: What if he's guilty and he gets away with it?
Well, then that presents us a new conundrum: Which is worse? To give a killer a second chance or to condemn an innocent to death?
I think the implications speak for themselves: What we have to lose letting a killer go free is indefinite, and while it could potentially prove far more disastrous than one innocent death, one innocent death is precisely a consequence we can be certain of if we make the wrong decision. And even then it begs the question of whether condemning innocents can even be justified given a certain outcome.
What sort of justice is that?
Anyway I'll shut up now. My new rating for 12 Angry Men is 5 out of 5.
Final Verdict: [Friggen' Awesome]