The Shooting

There are some aspects of the direction I can appreciate but this movie’s plot and characters were just boring. It’s supposed to be tense and trippy but it fails at this due to the almost non-existent atmosphere. I was never surprised or impressed by this movie’s attempts at being weird, it just felt standard and derivative for the most part. I was taken out of the story many times due to how sloppy the filmmaking was. The editing was sloppy, the effects were unconvincing, the shots were bland and uninteresting, and the acting was inconsistent. This movie’s characters felt very poorly written, they constantly changed in ways that didn’t feel natural or earned. It didn’t feel like they were inconsistent because of an intentional creative choice but rather because the writing, direction, and acting for them was poorly done. I’m all for movies having weird approaches for characterization, but not in ways that feel sloppy and lazy. 2001: A Space Odyssey is a good example of how to break traditional characterization in a way that feels thematically appropriate and interesting. In this movie it mostly feels unintentional. There were some parts of the movie where I laughed out loud because of how poorly written the dialogue was, it has zero subtlety despite its constant insistence otherwise. The only thing about this movie that wasn’t mediocre or bad was the musical score. It was fairly unique for a western.