Sunday, November 14, 2010

"Hereafter...has the same effect as an encounter with a phony physic – it keeps delivering just enough to tantalize, never has a real payoff and eventually makes you realize that you've been conned."

Richard Knight Jr.

Mike wrote about Hereafter on his class blog a few weeks ago. I hadn't seen it at the time, but I agreed that what he described didn't sound very enthralling.

Now, I've seen it, and I can wholeheartedly agree that Hereafter is incredibly disappointing. The most climactic scene happens in the first five minutes of the movie, and then there are about two hours of separate stories that really only connect in the end, and even then, I don't think there is a payoff. I won't describe the plot or go into much detail, because Mike already did that.

I guess I would only add that I think this could have been a fantastic movie, but almost every time the writer and producers had a choice to make, they chose something that I would consider bad (as Mike put it, they played it safe; they didn't take any risks). I would have been more interested in seeing the movie that I thought I was going to see based on just the first five minutes of the movie; that's when things changed drastically, for the worse. I would have been interested in seeing a movie about the twin brothers. Even the psychic angle could have been engaging, in either of these options. But the makers of Hereafter combined two or three usable plots into one tangled mess of a movie, with no life in it. Ironic, eh?

2 comments:

  1. Haha. I know. But I couldn't help it. It was part of the triple feature at the drive-in. Besides, I paid 8 bucks and saw two movies. Megamind alone would have been worth at least 7 bucks. ;-)

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