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Take Shelter
Psychological Thriller / English / 2011
WHY'D I WATCH IT?
It's a psychological thriller that's been buried among the identical marketing material for other rural dramas like Gone Girl. Is it good? Other reviewers think so.
WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
I'm pretty disappointed in this movie.
Not because I expected a lot going into it, but because it raised my expectations as it went on and it failed to realize the premise summaries I was reading about it.
Basic premise is Main Guy starts having nightmares that begin affecting his day-to-day life, it's eventually revealed that he worries that they foretell a big storm, while simultaneously worrying that he's developing paranoid schizophrenia in his 30s like his mom did.
The whole issue stems from the "it's eventually revealed" part, since I was reading that he was supposed to be receiving 'apocalyptic visions', but that's not at all what was communicated to me by the movie. There's an intermittently recurring storm theme in his nightmares, but nothing's immediately to suggest that it's "apocalyptic" beyond the rain being a funny color. It takes all the way until 90+% of the way into the movie before he imagines birds falling dead out of the sky.
Most of the time he's just imagining his dog attacking him, or someone else he knows attacking him, and then he associates that with some gas phenomenon he sees on TV once.
There isn't even any reason to believe he's experiencing schizophrenia symptoms whatsoever before he's borrowing mental illness books from the library and going to consult his mother on her experiences BEFORE we're ever told she's in a home for schizophrenia. The comments she makes about believing people were out to get her are really just a confusing contrast to Main Guy's experiences, which we only know to include nightmares.
The first time he hallucinates anything at all is the day after he takes some medication to help him sleep which confounds the premise even further.
Eventually we're supposed to believe that he's gone over the edge and is convinced there's some end-of-days gas storm on the way which he's endangered his daughter's ear surgery and borrowed against his house to expand a storm shelter to protect against... but really, the only evidence we as viewers have that he believes any such thing is the choices he makes insisting such, and he barely insists at all. He's virtually stoic throughout the entire movie up until the scene where he gets fired from his job (which makes that "risky loan" he took look especially nasty) and flips out on an entire room of people insisting "THERE'S A STORM A-COMIN'!!!".
So it's really just that sort of post-hoc "this is why the viewer surrogate is doing this" sort of thing which is just kind of frustrating to watch. This stuff can be visually communicated to me through the medium of MOOOVIES and I'm not really getting that.
The proverbial cigarette burn that seals my issues with this movie is two-fold. One; there's really only two ways to end this movie: It was all in his head, or he's genuinely foretelling disaster. Take Shelter decides they want to have it both ways by having the big reveal that he's hallucinating the big storm, but then also betraying that by having an actually big storm.
I realize that's the more negative way I could put that, but that's how I feel about when it doesn't feel like either angle was earned.
Two; The "actual" big storm that's revealed in the end seems pretty ****in' feeble. We get a wideshot of the ocean with scary clouds, a couple visible waterspouts off in the distance, and the rain is piss-colored.
Ooooh, big dramatic moment where The Wife wordlessly nods her acknowledgment that Main Guy was right all along. That's pretty worthless to me. The one wideshot shot of the sandstorm in Mad Max: Fury Road, a movie known for relatively conservative CG, would have been a better sell on an end-of-days storm.
Now I'm not all negative, I like Main Guy's actor, it's easy to engage with him, the sound design was solid, I appreciate that Deaf Daughter wasn't the brutally hamfisted plot device that they were in A Quiet Place, or the kid in Signs, whose singular quirk is the alien's weakness or whatever.
Overall all though, we're clearly building up to this moment where we're revealing one of two obvious paths and it feels just a bit melodramatic when it's just "oh, there's a storm", rush down to the shelter, "okay storm's over", "but what if it's not!?" and we basically need the orchestra to pull a lot of weight that the script is failing to muster.
I would have been annoyed by the outcome, but I would at least have been somewhat surprised, if the plot entailed Main Guy locking them all in the shelter and then destroying or losing the key. Or even what the Wikipedia article suggested, possibly locking himself apart from his family to protect them from himself, which at no point happens.
The Wikipedia article also mentions this movie "explores themes of masculinity" which is also a massive ****ing lie and clearly written by a mentally deranged butthole because that is in literally no way substantiated by the movie.
Dude pisses the bed and is embarrassed to talk about how his nightmares have made him scared of the family dog, that's nothing to do with masculinity, that's just a human being with shame. Shut the absolute **** up, whoever wrote that horseshit.
Anyway, I'm calling this one on the upper-end of Meh... but I'll give it an Okay.
Final Verdict: [Okay]
Take Shelter
Psychological Thriller / English / 2011
WHY'D I WATCH IT?
It's a psychological thriller that's been buried among the identical marketing material for other rural dramas like Gone Girl. Is it good? Other reviewers think so.
WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
I'm pretty disappointed in this movie.
Not because I expected a lot going into it, but because it raised my expectations as it went on and it failed to realize the premise summaries I was reading about it.
Basic premise is Main Guy starts having nightmares that begin affecting his day-to-day life, it's eventually revealed that he worries that they foretell a big storm, while simultaneously worrying that he's developing paranoid schizophrenia in his 30s like his mom did.
The whole issue stems from the "it's eventually revealed" part, since I was reading that he was supposed to be receiving 'apocalyptic visions', but that's not at all what was communicated to me by the movie. There's an intermittently recurring storm theme in his nightmares, but nothing's immediately to suggest that it's "apocalyptic" beyond the rain being a funny color. It takes all the way until 90+% of the way into the movie before he imagines birds falling dead out of the sky.
Most of the time he's just imagining his dog attacking him, or someone else he knows attacking him, and then he associates that with some gas phenomenon he sees on TV once.
There isn't even any reason to believe he's experiencing schizophrenia symptoms whatsoever before he's borrowing mental illness books from the library and going to consult his mother on her experiences BEFORE we're ever told she's in a home for schizophrenia. The comments she makes about believing people were out to get her are really just a confusing contrast to Main Guy's experiences, which we only know to include nightmares.
The first time he hallucinates anything at all is the day after he takes some medication to help him sleep which confounds the premise even further.
Eventually we're supposed to believe that he's gone over the edge and is convinced there's some end-of-days gas storm on the way which he's endangered his daughter's ear surgery and borrowed against his house to expand a storm shelter to protect against... but really, the only evidence we as viewers have that he believes any such thing is the choices he makes insisting such, and he barely insists at all. He's virtually stoic throughout the entire movie up until the scene where he gets fired from his job (which makes that "risky loan" he took look especially nasty) and flips out on an entire room of people insisting "THERE'S A STORM A-COMIN'!!!".
So it's really just that sort of post-hoc "this is why the viewer surrogate is doing this" sort of thing which is just kind of frustrating to watch. This stuff can be visually communicated to me through the medium of MOOOVIES and I'm not really getting that.
The proverbial cigarette burn that seals my issues with this movie is two-fold. One; there's really only two ways to end this movie: It was all in his head, or he's genuinely foretelling disaster. Take Shelter decides they want to have it both ways by having the big reveal that he's hallucinating the big storm, but then also betraying that by having an actually big storm.
I realize that's the more negative way I could put that, but that's how I feel about when it doesn't feel like either angle was earned.
Two; The "actual" big storm that's revealed in the end seems pretty ****in' feeble. We get a wideshot of the ocean with scary clouds, a couple visible waterspouts off in the distance, and the rain is piss-colored.
Ooooh, big dramatic moment where The Wife wordlessly nods her acknowledgment that Main Guy was right all along. That's pretty worthless to me. The one wideshot shot of the sandstorm in Mad Max: Fury Road, a movie known for relatively conservative CG, would have been a better sell on an end-of-days storm.
Now I'm not all negative, I like Main Guy's actor, it's easy to engage with him, the sound design was solid, I appreciate that Deaf Daughter wasn't the brutally hamfisted plot device that they were in A Quiet Place, or the kid in Signs, whose singular quirk is the alien's weakness or whatever.
Overall all though, we're clearly building up to this moment where we're revealing one of two obvious paths and it feels just a bit melodramatic when it's just "oh, there's a storm", rush down to the shelter, "okay storm's over", "but what if it's not!?" and we basically need the orchestra to pull a lot of weight that the script is failing to muster.
I would have been annoyed by the outcome, but I would at least have been somewhat surprised, if the plot entailed Main Guy locking them all in the shelter and then destroying or losing the key. Or even what the Wikipedia article suggested, possibly locking himself apart from his family to protect them from himself, which at no point happens.
The Wikipedia article also mentions this movie "explores themes of masculinity" which is also a massive ****ing lie and clearly written by a mentally deranged butthole because that is in literally no way substantiated by the movie.
Dude pisses the bed and is embarrassed to talk about how his nightmares have made him scared of the family dog, that's nothing to do with masculinity, that's just a human being with shame. Shut the absolute **** up, whoever wrote that horseshit.
Anyway, I'm calling this one on the upper-end of Meh... but I'll give it an Okay.
Final Verdict: [Okay]