my analysis of this movie sits on one axis: how should real life events be best converted to film?
on the axis we have the bounds
documentary <—————> almost pure fiction
and this movie makes the intentional decision to lie close to the left bound of the spectrum, but not actually at the left bound — and I think that’s a total miss
if you’re going to make a movie about real events and fudge it a bit, at least fudge it well! there were zero interesting characters or development — an impressive feat for a movie across such a large timescale — the history of the slum was too shallowly explored, the way in which the gangs impacted the lives of normal slum residents was not explored, and the plot is basically about lil z being power hungry and acting incredibly consistently on that notion. it is shocking to me that the source material for this movie is so interesting (because there’s clearly a lot to play with here!!) but the movie itself is so boring. if this movie was labeled as fiction, people would call it “trash with good worldbuilding”. but the worldbuilding is real, so you can’t really give the filmmakers any credit for that
think of zodiac — a movie about a real life story that takes many more creative liberties with the retelling: they looked at the very-entertaining real life story, made some cuts, fudged some numbers, and created a GREAT final product.
this movie, in contrast, either A) took few creative liberties (in which case make this a youtube video or a documentary, these characters are not interesting enough to warrant a story-based telling), or B) they are bad scriptwriters and made poor decisions to add entertainment value
would not recommend, to anyone. this is squandered potential
my analysis of this movie sits on one axis: how should real life events be best converted to film?
on the axis we have the bounds
documentary <—————> almost pure fiction
and this movie makes the intentional decision to lie close to the left bound of the spectrum, but not actually at the left bound — and I think that’s a total miss
if you’re going to make a movie about real events and fudge it a bit, at least fudge it well! there were zero interesting characters or development — an impressive feat for a movie across such a large timescale — the history of the slum was too shallowly explored, the way in which the gangs impacted the lives of normal slum residents was not explored, and the plot is basically about lil z being power hungry and acting incredibly consistently on that notion. it is shocking to me that the source material for this movie is so interesting (because there’s clearly a lot to play with here!!) but the movie itself is so boring. if this movie was labeled as fiction, people would call it “trash with good worldbuilding”. but the worldbuilding is real, so you can’t really give the filmmakers any credit for that
think of zodiac — a movie about a real life story that takes many more creative liberties with the retelling: they looked at the very-entertaining real life story, made some cuts, fudged some numbers, and created a GREAT final product.
this movie, in contrast, either A) took few creative liberties (in which case make this a youtube video or a documentary, these characters are not interesting enough to warrant a story-based telling), or B) they are bad scriptwriters and made poor decisions to add entertainment value
would not recommend, to anyone. this is squandered potential
