Animal
Watch Animal, they said. You cannot judge a movie without watching it. I read four books and watched five movies to decisively conclude that Twilight was a stain on the genre of fantasy fiction and that having the word ostentatious in your dictionary does not make you a great storyteller. I should be able to endure 201 minutes of Animal, right?
I did, and I can safely say that I have been unfair to Twilight and Stephanie Meyer. In comparison, Twilight is a Shakespearean masterpiece of fine storytelling.
Casting aside all considerations of morality or ethics and evaluating the movie purely for cinema and storytelling, the movie has the narrative structure of wet paper. Not wet cardboard, but wet paper.
The strained and fraught father-son relationship should make for compelling and fantastic storytelling. Harry Chapin wrote a song capturing the tragic cycle. The biggest space opera of all time, Star Wars, is centered around a hero with daddy issues. The latest critical darling, The Iron Claw, shows a real-life tragedy caused by bad fathers. So, on paper, an audacious director creating a story based on a time-tested human emotion should be something to be excited about.
But a few slick action sequences and an overconfident hero with a swagger do not make a good movie. Firstly, there is no narrative arc in the movie. None of the characters experience any depth or growth. There is no fall from grace, redemption, hero's journey, full circle moment, or even a coherent three-act structure. They are all a monochromatic one-note flatline from beginning to end. Boring.
The non-linear narrative adds zero interest or value. To quote myself, this movie has more incoherent time travel than Doc's DeLorean on the fritz. Some of the timeline cuts are the most jarring and abrupt ever. What is this amateur hour at a middle school film class?
Moreover, the movie is stuffed with scenes that add no value to the narrative but simply fill it with excessive length and bloat. Gitanjali is as essential to the film as Arwen is to Lord of the Rings. A minor character from the appendices is forced into a major narrative role to satisfy the audience's penchant for romances. It is a distraction from fleshing out the protagonist and his demons. Some of the sequences, like meeting the parents, the honeymoon, the prayer, the church sequence, the naked celebration, the extramarital seduction, the antagonist's faith, and the antagonist's hedonism, add absolutely nothing to the plot and are merely there to be edgy for the point of being edgy. No different from a petulant emo teen rebelling against their parents.
The movie demands the most extreme suspension of disbelief. The entire plot of protecting the father is flaccid. There is no narrative tension in unraveling the threads of motivation. There are actually no twists revealed because everything is not just foreshadowed but extrapolated in the open. The protagonist is always one step ahead of the antagonist without any explanations of how or why.
How this film became the biggest hit of 2023 will always leave me scratching my head. The movie is like the director's fantasy wet dream rather than a movie, and people are lapping it up. But then I didn't get why Twilight was such a big hit, either. I've always conceded that Stephanie Meyer was a genius for knowing the untapped market of the horny yet naive teenage girl who wants to have her cake and eat it too - but make it cinematic. In that sense, I have to concede that Vanga is also a genius for knowing an untapped market.......of what I am still trying to figure out - women with a kink for being dominated? men who nostalgically miss the simple way of life before Prometheus and Pandora ruined it all?
Sometimes, you can judge a book by its cover. Sometimes, that book is a Mills and Boon novel where the cover tells you exactly what to expect inside and pretty much tells you the story. I was right with Animal. It's that same genre where the trailer tells you exactly what to expect. I don't read books trashed on Goodreads - why did I watch this movie? Only I am to blame for the lost 201 minutes of my life.
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