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Wicked: Part One (2024)
It’s shocking that it took this long for Wicked to make its way from the Broadway stage to the big screen. The musical, based upon Gregory Maguire’s novel, began in 2003 and while it may have lost out on the biggest Tony Awards that year to Avenue Q (it seems astonishing now but… you just had to be there in 2004, theater kids) the show has been a smash for over two decades, accruing over a billion dollars as the second highest-grossing stage show of all time. As show after show got its turn as a movie, I kept wondering what was taking so long with an obviously mass appealing show like Wicked. It’s the classic Hollywood desire of “same but different,” a reclamation project for none other than the Wicked Witch of the West, retelling her tale from her perspective. Well, Wicked’s time has eventually dawned, and the studio is going to feast upon its protracted wait. Taking a page from the YA adaptation trend that dominated the 2010s, they’ve split the show into two movies, separated by a full year, hoping to better capitalize on the phenomenon. I was wary about Part One being 150 minutes, the same length as the ENTIRE Wicked stage show, but having seen the finished product, and by “finished” I mean one half, I can safely say that Wicked is genuinely fabulous and deftly defies the gravity of expectations.
In the fantasy world of Oz, the green-skinned outcast Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo) is looked at with scorn, derision, and fear. She’s always been different and never fully accepted by her father who blames her for her mother’s death and her younger sister Nessarose (Marissa Bode) being stricken to a wheelchair. Nessa is going to study at Shiz University with all the other up-and-coming coeds of the land of Oz, including Glinda (Arianna Grande), a popular and frivolous preppie gal peppered in pink pastels. Glinda desperately wants to be taken seriously and become a witch, studying magic under the tutelage of the esteemed Madame Morrible (Michelle Yeoh). Instead, Morrible’s fascination falls upon Elphaba after she reveals her tremendous magical ability in a moment of extreme emotion. Now Elphaba is enrolled at the magic school and learning about the way of the world, and she’s stuck with Glinda as her roommate. The two women couldn’t be any more different but over the course of the movie, we’ll uncover how one became Glinda the Good and the other the Wicked Witch of the West.
At two-and-a-half hours long, again the length of both acts of the stage show, Wicked Part One only covers the events of the show’s first act, and yet it feels complete and satisfying and, even most surprising, extremely well paced. It’s hard for me to fathom what could have been lost to get the running time down as each scene adds something valuable to our better understanding of these characters and their progression and the discovery of the larger world. It’s a movie that feels constantly in motion, propelling forward with such winning ebullient energy that it becomes infectious. It’s also not afraid to slow things down, to allow moments to breathe, and to provide further characterization and shading that wasn’t included in the stage show. The adaptation brings the fireworks for the finale and raises the visual stakes and danger in a manner that feels exciting and compellingly cinematic. Considering the resplendent results, I feel I could argue that the movie is actually -here comes the heretical hyperbole, theater kids- an improvement over the stage musical. It makes me even more excited for a bolder, longer, potentially even more emotionally satisfying second part in November 2025.
One of my primary praises for 2021’s In the Heights was that director John M. Chu, who cut his teeth helming the Step Up movies, knows exactly how to adapt musicals to maximize the potential of the big screen. If you’re a fan of musicals, old and new, you’ll find yourself swept away with the scope and intricacy of these large fantasy worlds, the flourishes of costume and production design, as well as the creative choreography making fine use of spaces and the power of film editing. There’s a rousing dance sequence set in a library with shelves that rotate around the room, making the slippery choreography that much more immersive, impressive, and acrobatic. Even big crowd numbers are given the knowing framing and sense of scale to hit their full potential, from the opening rendition of Munchkinland celebrating the death of the Wicked Witch of the West complete with giant burning effigy that would make a Wickerman envious, to the introduction to the City of Oz where it appears every citizen has a jovial role to play in welcoming strangers to their enchanted capital city. Chu’s nimble camerawork allows us to really enjoy the staging and skills of the talent onscreen, bringing a beating sense of vitality we crave from musical theater writ large. Wicked is simply one of the best stage-to-screen adaptations in musical theater history and a joyous experience that allows the viewer sumptuous visuals.
At its core, the story of Wicked is about some pretty resonant themes like self-acceptance, bullying, the fear of what is different or misunderstood, and all of this is built upon an irresistible friendship between Glinda and Elphaba. The rivals-to-allies formula isn’t new but it is tremendously effective and satisfying, especially when both characters are as well drawn and deserving of our empathy as these two ladies. They’re each on a different meaningful character arc for us to chart their personal growth and disillusion with what they’ve been taught is The Way Things Are. One is starting from a disadvantaged position and gaining traction through an outward demonstration of power, and the other is beginning in a position of privilege and becoming humble and more considerate as she acknowledges the challenges of others in a manner that doesn’t have to reconfirm her enviable “goodness.” It just works, and both women are fantastic in their roles. I was on the verge of tears at several points and my heart felt as full as a balloon throughout because of the emotional engagement and heartwarming camaraderie between our two leading ladies. With all its razzle dazzle, Wicked is a story of feminine friendship first and foremost and emotionally rewarding to experience, with the soaring music as a bonus.
Let’s finally talk about the music, a key factor in the enjoyment of any musical, naturally. The music was written by Stephen Schwartz, the Oscar-winning composer for “Colors of the Wind” from Pocahontas as well as “Believe” from The Prince of Egypt. I found his Wicked numbers to range from good to astoundingly good, with catchy ear-worms like “Popular” to the anthemic power and sweep of “Defying Gravity.” The cheeky and toe-tapping “Dancing Through Life” is a showcase for Jonathan Bailey (Bridgerton) and benefits from the aforementioned creative library choreography. “I’m Not That Girl” is a heartbreaking ode to the girls who don’t think of themselves as enough, which is begging for a reappearance in Part Two. The only clunker is “A Sentimental Man” but that’s more the result of the deficiencies of Jeff Goldblum as a singer than the song. I await the reuse of themes and motifs that will make the music even more thematically rich in the eventual Part Two.
Count me as part of the skeptical throng when it was announced that Grande, who hasn’t acted in over ten years, was cast as Glinda. I’m here to say that she is uniformly great. The Glinda role is the more outwardly showy role and thus immediately more memorable. It’s the far more comedic role, in fact the main source of comedy in the show, and Grande has serious comedic chops. Naturally she excels with the singing and its purposeful miasmic bombast, but it’s the subtle comedic styling and the exaggerated physicality that impressed me the most, like a moment of her twirling on the floor as an added dramatic flourish. There’s one scene where she’s just marching up and down a hallway in full exuberance, kicking, dancing, and exploding with joy. I anticipated that Erivo (Bad Times at the El Royale) would be exceptional, and of course the Broadway vet is, as she brings such simmering life to Elphaba. There’s a strength in equal measure to her vulnerability, making the character fully felt. Erivo also delivers during the big moments, like the climax of the movie that can give you goosebumps in hiw it weaves together empowerment and defiance and self-acceptance. Together, the two women are an unbreakable pair of performers and heroes that we’ll want to see triumph over adversity.
After decades of belabored waiting, Wicked finally makes its journey from stage to screen and I must say it was worth every minute. The film, even at only one half, feels complete and richly realized, building upon the strong foundation of the stage show and its numerous winning elements and masterfully translating them to cinema, taking full advantage of the visual possibilities while also expanding upon the story and themes for further enrichment. While born in the early 2000s War on Terror Bush era of politics, Wicked’s themes of anti-immigrant fear-mongering as scapegoats still bears striking resonance today, as do the emerging warnings of fascism in Oz. If you’re a fan of The Wizard of Oz, musical theater, or even just grandiose spectacle that doesn’t dilute grandiose feelings, then step into Wicked and you too will feel like you’re floating on air.
Nate’s Grade: A
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Rebel Moon: Director’s Cut (2024)
What a rarity for a movie to potentially appear twice on my worst of the year list, and such is the destiny of Zack Snyder’s Rebel Moon, originally released in 2023 and the first half of 2024, and now with added lengthier director’s cuts. So what do you get in the newest “Snyder cuts” besides fewer hours in your day? Let’s tackle the opening sequence demonstrating the power and villainy of our evil empire as they invade a crumbling city in resistance. Within short order we’ve witnessed: 1) female priestesses being forcefully disrobed and having their breasts branded, 2) an adorable little CGI pet become a literal suicide bomber, 3) a son brutally beating his father’s brains out of his skull to spare their family only for them all to be massacred anyway. Yikes. While there is a little more world-building absent from Snyder’s prior cuts, like a religious sect that turns the teeth of their conquered victims into a decorative washboard, even the extra time, and it is literally hours over the course of the two parts, feels strained and still poorly developed to better understand the world, the characters, the conflict, the history, anything that could make Snyder’s hopeful franchise its own universe. Theres now a giant metal goddess whose tears fuel space travel. All right then. One of the more interesting characters, the samurai-esque loner robot, is given more material but he’s still just as inscrutable. There’s plenty more cruelty here, slow-motion head shots painting the screen in sticky viscera. There’s also plenty more breathless and awkwardly extended sex scenes, but hey, at least those are consensual, so there’s that. I’m just stunned why Netflix would want different versions of these movies when they’re ultimately all housed under the same banner. It sure feels like the “Snyder cut” brand is now an expected marketing ploy to be exploited for added publicity. After all, why watch one long slightly bloody poorly written sci-fi space opera, when you could watch TWO versions, one of which being even bloodier and more miserable? Will there be an even Snyderier Snyder cut, adding more scenes of side characters suffering and even more festishized gore in even slower motion? Will the whole movie just be played in slow motion, now requiring nine hours? Where does it even end, Netflix?
Nate’s Grade: D
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Emilia Perez (2024)
Movie musicals can be sweeping, invigorating, and at their very best transporting, They mingle the high-flying fantasies and visual potential of the cinema, and we’ve gone through many waves of kinds of musicals. Today, we’re in an outlandish world of the outlandish musical, an experience in ironic air 210quotes, where stories that you never would have thought could be musicals would then dare to be different and attempt to be musicals. The much-anticipated Joker sequel, Folie a Deux, dares to be a challenging jukebox musical of old favorites. The French movie Emilia Perez tells the story of a cartel leader that undergoes a sex change and tries to do good with her second life. Both movies are deeply interesting messes as well as experiences I don’t think work as musicals.
In contrast, Netflix’s Emilia Perez is like an entire season of a telenovela streamlined into a two-hour-plus movie that manages to also, for better or worse, be a musical. It is filled with many outlandish and provocative elements you would never expect to be associated with singing and dancing, like a sex change surgery center. This movie mixes so many genres and tones that at one point it feels like you’re watching a crime thriller about Mexican cartels and their manipulation of those in power, and then the next moment it feels like you’re watching an absurd rendition of Mrs. Doubtfire, where a spouse has adopted a new identity and uses this to spend time with their kids they otherwise would not be able to do so. It’s a wild film-going experience; I can’t recall too many musicals that use street stabbings in syncopation with percussion. Because of its go-for-broke ambitions and veering tones, Emilia Perez is destined to be a cult movie, some that fall in love with its bizarre mishmash of elements, but most will probably be stupefied by the entire experience and questioning why, exactly, this was made into a musical.
In Mexico City, Rita Castro (Zoe Saldana) is a savvy defense lawyer tired of living in the shadows of her buffoonish bosses that rely upon her writing prowess to win cases. Someone sees great potential with her, and it happens to be Manitas del Monte (Karla Sofia Gascon), the head of a dangerous cartel. He wants Rita to find the international means to finish the process of Manitas surgically becoming a woman. Under the gun, metaphorically and literally, Rita finds the doctors who will transform the dangerous him into a new her. Manitas then fakes their death, leaving his old life behind to start anew, including their children and wife, Jessi (Selena Gomez). Manitas becomes the titular Emila Perez, but rather retire in luxury, she wants to do good, and Emilia begins a non-profit organization that exhumes bodies, victims from the cartels, to provide closure for their widows and grieving families. Emilia then invites Jessi and their kids to come live in her estate, explaining she is a formerly unknown “aunt” to Manitas. Now Rita is trying to run Emilia’s organization, keeps Emilia from going too far in revealing her identity, and looking out for her own sake considering she’s one of the few that knows about a life before Emila Perez.
I know there will be hand-wringing and cultural tut-tut-ing about the movie’s implicit and explicit themes dealing with trans issues, exploring one woman’s exploration of self and securing the identity she’s always wanted through the lens of a lurid soap opera trading in stereotypes. It’s a lot of movie to digest, and while it feels entirely sincere in every one of its strange creative decisions, it’s also the kind of movie whose tone can invite snickers or derision, like the sex change clinic where a heavily bandaged chorus repeats words like, “vagioplastia” and “penoplastia.” It’s a movie with extreme feelings to go along with its extreme plot turns, but the whole movie feels like it’s trying to settle on a better calibrated wavelength of melodrama.
I think this could have been significantly improved by director/co-writer Jacques Audiard (Rust and Bone, A Prophet) had he embraced more of the movie’s outlandish reality breaking through. Too few of the musical numbers actually do something more than witness someone singing. The opening number, one of the best, involves Rita trying to compose a defense through the streets of Mexico City, while a crowd sweeps around her, often stopping to chime in as an impromptu chorus, sometimes setting up props for her use. It’s a great kickoff, the energy crackling, and I was looking forward to what the rest of the movie could offer. There’s only one other musical number that recreates this significant energy and engagement, a fundraising dinner for Emilia’s organization amongst the powerful members of society. While Emilia speaks at a podium, Rita struts around the floor, sashaying between the tables, and informing the audience about all the dirty deeds and skeletons of the assembled muckety-mucks. She’s literally manhandling the frozen participants, dancing atop their tables in defiance, and it’s a magnificent moment because of how it breaks from our reality to lean into the storytelling potential of musicals. These sequences work so well that it’s flabbergasting that Audiard has, essentially, settled for far less creatively for too much of his movie’s staging. The big Selena Gomez song is just her listlessly singing to the camera while shifting her weight while standing, like the laziest music video of her career. Why tease the audience with the crazy heights as a musical if you’re unwilling?
And now let’s tackle the music, which to my ears was too often rather underwhelming.It sounds like temp music that was intended to be replaced and never was. It’s lacking distinct personality, catchy or memorable melodies, anthems and themes, the things that make musicals enjoyable. The best songs also happen to be the best staged sequences, both involving Rita. These songs have a different vivacious energy by incorporating a hip-hop style of syncopation. “El Mar,” the song during the fundraising dinner, offers an infectious chorus adding extra percussive elements like people slamming fists down onto tables, listening to plates and glasses rattle. These are the moments that enliven a musical and convey its style and panache. Alas, too many of the songs lack that vitality, and can best be described as blandly competent and too readily forgettable.
It’s a shame because Saldana is giving her finest screen performance to date (to be fair, I never watched her Nina Simone biopic). The actress best known for being the strong warrior in sci-fi franchises like Avatar, Guardians of the Galaxy, and Star Trek plays an intriguing character with a rising fire of purpose and paranoia. Early on. Rita is ambitious but unhappy, practically dowdy in appearance, and she begins to come alive under her new role for Emilia. Saldana is electric as she sings and dances and slips effortlessly between Spanish and English, possibly to her first Oscar nomination. She’s the standout, which is slightly strange considering the role of Emilia Perez should be the breakout. Gascon, a trans actress, is quite good in such an outsized role, and gets to play her pre-transitioned identity as well under gobs of masculine makeup and tattoos. The fault isn’t with Gascon’s performance, the issue is that her character has such amazing potential but feels criminally underdeveloped. There is a world of issues of self-identity, culture, repression, shame, anger, jealousy, desire, to name but a few, that could be richly explored from the perspective of the leader of a deadly gang wanting to become a woman. The character is left too inscrutable for my tastes, leaving behind so much unobserved drama. As a result, even though the movie is literally named after her, Emilia Perez feels like a projection more than a character, and if that was indeed the point, then we needed more conflict about that friction.
Emilia Perez is a lot of things all at once; campy, ridiculous, sincere, crazy. It’s messy but it’s an admirably ambitious mess, one that even the faults can be the unexpected charms for someone else. I didn’t fall in love with this genre-bending experiment, although I found portions to be fascinating and others to be confounding. I don’t even think the musical aspects were finely integrated and explored, and so they feel like more of a gimmick, a splashy attempt to marry the high-art of musical theater with the perceived lower-art of grisly crime thrillers and melodrama. It earns marks for daring but the execution is haphazard and scattershot at best. There are moments that elevate the material, where the musical elements feel confidently integrated and supported with the dramatic sequence of events, providing an unexpected and rousing response. However, those moments are few and far between, and the absence only further cements what could have been. Emilia Perez might be your worst movie of the year, a grave miscalculation in tone and storytelling, or it might be a transporting and wild experience, one that can lock up multiple Academy Award combinations for its artistic bravura, a middle-aged Frenchman telling the story of trans empowerment through the guise of a Spanish-speaking musical framework. It sounds like so much and yet paradoxically I was left disappointed that it wasn’t more.
Nate’s Grade: C+
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Daddio (2024)
A lengthy conversation playing out in real-time between two strangers who open up to one another over the course of one taxi drive from the airport. If it feels Richard Linklater-adjacent, that’s because writer/director Christy Hall (I Am Not Okay With This) has certainly been influenced by the chatty likes of Linklater, as she sticks us in the cab for the entire duration of that 90-minute ride and movie. We have Dakota Johnson as the fare, a woman returning home after visiting family with secrets and shame that she’ll reveal over the course of this cab ride. We have Sean Penn as the cab driver, a seen-it-all cynic who keeps pushing for more answers and conversation from his passenger. The problem with movies based solely around conversations is that the conversation has to be mesmerizing, exhibiting great care to impart artful and authentic character details that make us reconsider these people, and hopefully provide challenges to preconceived norms and ingrained perspectives that can foster reflective growth. Nobody wants to watch a movie about a trivial conversation over 90 minutes. The problem with Daddio is that it’s not really a two-way conversation; Penn acts more as an interrogator, slowly chipping away at the layers that Johnson’s young woman feels comfortable presenting publicly. The dialogue is fine but unremarkable, eschewing overly stylized verbosity for something more natural, but even with that choice the details we are granted are clumsy and minimal. Get ready for lots of protracted pauses awaiting texting replies. The acting is fairly solid throughout, especially Johnson since it is a whole showcase for her in that backseat. If we’re going to be riding shotgun on a 90-minute conversation, I guess I’m just looking for far more scintillating details, whether it’s from the characters, their conflicts, or just their gregarious dialogue. If we’re stuck with two people, let’s be stuck with two people we actually might want to share a cab with.
Nate’s Grade: C+
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Didi (2024)
It feels slightly strange when you acknowledge that coming-of-age movies have long-surpassed your own age of adolescent personal discovery. With Sundance indie Didi, we’ve now brought that time frame up to 2008, where we follow the 13-year-old Chris (Izac Wang), a first-generation Taiwanese-American kid trying to flirt with his junior high crush, get better at skateboarding, edit YouTube videos that people might actually want to see, and perhaps make some new friends during the summer before high school begins. This is one of those movies that lives or dies by its slice-of-life details and sense of authenticity. Writer/director Sean Wang does an excellent job placing the audience in the position of his biographical avatar, Chris. We feel his discomfort trying to navigate the different cultural expectations of home life and school life, the perils of trying to step outside your comfort zone and be rewarded rather than embarrassed. This is compounded by Chris having to endure and brush aside the stereotypes his peers project onto him for being Asian-American. The problem with the movie is that our main character is kind of a twit. He’s so harsh and unfair to his long-suffering mother (Lust, Caution‘s Joan Chen) that his own friends eventually complain about his rude behavior. In a moment of awkward discomfort, he calls his friend’s crush “a whore,” and then describes how he and his friend messed around with the corpse of a squirrel once. He also pees in his older sister’s lotion bottle. The whole “befriending cool skateboarders” storyline goes nowhere, nor does it open up some deeper understanding of our character and his wants, talents, or capabilities. Didi’s real distinct angle could have been growing up in the Internet age, and there it too feels lacking. It all feels a little like we’re spending too much time with the wrong family member. The put-upon mother would have been an even more intriguing person to explore, especially as she yearns to be an artist, deals with her bratty kids, an overbearing mother-in-law living with them without a kind word to say, and a husband half the world away busy working. Getting stuck with the angsty kid feels disappointing.
Nate’s Grade: B-
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Trap (2024)
At this point, there is a certain expectation with any M. Night Shyamalan movie that reality will be heightened, that people will never talk like actual human beings, and that his brand of unreality can become part of the unique selling point, nestling into a campy charm when it all coalesces. Such is the case with Trap, the ludicrous thriller that plays much more pleasingly as a wacky comedy of errors and incompetence as an entire city’s police force is looking for a notorious serial killer, The Butcher a.k.a. Cooper (Josh Hartnett), at a concert for a pop star (Syamalan’s own daughter, Saleka). It’s a silly premise that essentially endangers thousands of innocent concert-goers where the plan is to, I guess, grab any middle-aged white guy in attendance and question them? It’s absurd, but it becomes a fun game of watching our trapped killer try and work out different escape options and adapt on the fly, while also being that supportive girl dad for his starstruck little tween. There’s an appealing “how is he gonna get outta this jam?” conflict resolution, though our deadly dad also acts so supremely weird, from buddying up with the merch guy, pushing ladies down stairs completely unbeknownst to observers, and trying to convince his daughter they should ditch this fancy concert to go explore what’s beneath a trap door. The hilarity is that Cooper is not really good at hiding his tracks, or his peculiarities, but everyone else in this universe is just that dim. It’s grand entertainment but definitely loses something once it leaves the central location for its final act, shifting the protagonist onto a new face that can’t quite carry the movie(reminded me of 2013’s The Call once it abandoned its premise for the final act). Given the heightened atmosphere, this is also the kind of movie that would have benefited from another twist or two, perhaps with Cooper’s family. Hartnett is playing a very specific tone and manages to make his character creepy, daffy, intense, and thoroughly watchable. If you’re in doubt what Shyamalan was going for, look no further than casting Parent Trap(!)-actress Hayley Mills as the older criminal psychologist trying to ensnare our killer with this outlandish ruse. Imagine Hitchcock by way of Peter Sellers, and you have Trap.
Nate’s Grade: B-
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Woman of the Hour (2024)
I never knew there was an actual serial killer that appeared on a 1978 episode of The Dating Game, and that he actually won. That’s a killer hook. The problem with Woman of the Hour, Anna Kendrick’s debut as a director, is that there isn’t really a movie here as presented. Because the game show segment can only last so long, we get the creepy first date, that never happened in real life, and watch Kendrick playing our lucky lady with mounting dread. A moment where the killer requests that she re-read the phone number she hastily gave him by memory, because she should know her number, is terrifically tense, as is the scene of him following her to her car. The problem is that this first date can only last so long, just as the cheesy TV game show segment can only last so long, so the movie has to provide extra back-story to fill the time. We get several past encounters with the killer’s unfortunate victims, all played quite unnervingly and seriously. The woman of the hour is less Kendrick getting her fleeting spotlight on TV, and an anecdote to impress people at parties for the rest of her life, than the survivor who eventually leads to the killer’s arrest. Amazingly, at the time of his TV appearance, he was on the FBI’s Most Wanted List but there wasn’t a searchable database, so he clumsily got to keep committing murders, including while out on bail. It’s a harrowing story, but is it one best told through the gimmick structure of the game show appearance? If you were going this route, perhaps best to treat the material like a slow-burn stage play, starting with the first date, and watch in real time as it gets awkward and our heroine begins to have her suspicions that this man does not mean her well. Instead, the game show segments are goofy and broad and the least important moments in the stretched-thin film. There might be a movie with this subject, but I’m not sure that Woman of the Hour is it.
Nate’s Grade: C+
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The Wild Robot (2024)
There must be something personally appealing when it concerns movies about hopeful robots that serve as change agents to new communities. WALL-E and The Iron Giant are two of my favorite films of all time, and while The Wild Robot won’t quite enter that all-hallowed echelon, it’s still a heartfelt and lovely movie that can appeal to anyone. We follow Roz (voiced by Lupita Nyong’o), a discarded robot looking for tasks to complete on an island. Fortunately, the robot learns how to communicate with the local wildlife, including a baby goose that our robot feels responsible to train how exactly to be a goose, including how to fly before the advent of winter and the larger flock migrates. The characters are kept pretty simple but that doesn’t mean their emotions are. The movie, based upon a popular children’s book series by Peter Brown, is refreshingly mature about nature’s life cycle, not treating death like a taboo subject too dark for children. The themes of parenting, being different, and finding an accepting home through compassion and courage are all resonant no matter your age, and I’m happy to report that I teared up at several points. The parent-child relationship between the damaged robot and orphaned gosling extends beyond them, inspiring other members of the island’s food chain to work together for common goals and sustainability. There’s a late antagonist thrown in to up the stakes and provide a bit more explosive action, including a magnetic magenta-colored forest fire. The movie doesn’t quite close as strongly as it opens, but writer/director Chris Sanders (Lilo & Stitch, How to Train Your Dragon) knows innately how to execute at such a high level where even simple characters and familiar themes have fully developed stories with soaring emotions that arrive fully earned.
Nate’s Grade: B+
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Primer (2004) [Review Re-View]
Originally released October 8, 2004:
I was intrigued about Primer because I had been told it was classy, smart sci-fi that’s so often missing in today’s entertainment line-up (see: Sci-Fi channel’s Mansquito). It won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival and the critical reviews had been generally very positive. So my expectations were high for a well wrought, high brow film analyzing time travel. What I got was one long, pretentious, incomprehensible, poorly paced and shot techno lecture. Oh it got bad. Oh did it get bad.
Aaron (Shane Carruth) and Abe (David Sullivan) run a team of inventors out of their garage. Their newest invention seems promising but they’re still confused about what it does. Aaron and Abe’s more commercially minded partners want to patent it and sell it. Aaron and Abe inspect their invention further and discover it has the ability to distort time. They invent larger versions and time travel themselves and thus create all kinds of paradoxes and loops and confusion for themselves and a viewing audience.
Watching Primer is like reading an instruction manual. The movie is practically crushed to death by techno terminology and all kinds of geek speak. The only people that will be able to follow along are those well-versed in quantum physics and engineering. Indeed, Primer has been called an attempt to make a “realistic time-travel movie,” which means no cars that can go 88 miles per hour. That’s fine and dandy but it makes for one awfully boring movie.
Primer would rather confound an audience than entertain them. There is a distinct difference between being complicated and being hard to follow. You’d need a couple volumes of Cliff Notes just to follow along Primer‘s talky and convoluted plot. I was so monumentally bored by Primer that I had to eject the DVD after 30 minutes. I have never in my life started a film at home and then turned it off, especially one I paid good money to rent, but after so many minutes of watching people talk above my head in a different language (techno jargon) I had reached my breaking point. Primer will frustrate most viewers because most will not be able to follow what is going on, and a normal human being can reasonably only sit for so long in the dark.
I did restart Primer and watched it to its completion, a scant 75 minutes long. The last 20 minutes is easier to grasp because it does finally deal with time travel and re-staging events. It’s a very long time to get to anything comprehensible. I probably should watch Primer again in all fairness but I have the suspicion that if I did my body would completely shut down on me in defense. Some people will love this and call it visionary, but those will be a very select group. It’s not just that Primer is incomprehensible but the film is also horrifically paced. When you don’t know what’s being said and what’s going on then scenes tend to drag because there is no connection. This movie is soooooo slow and it’s made all the worse by characters that are merely figureheads, dialogue that’s confusing and wooden, and a story that would rather spew ideas than a plot.
Writer/director/star Shane Carruth seems to have high ambitions but he has no empathy for an audience. Films can be dense and thought-provoking but they need to be accessible. Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko is a sci-fi mind bender but it’s also an accessible, relatable, enjoyable movie that’s become a cult favorite. Carruth also seems to think that shooting half the movie out of focus is a good idea.
I’m not against a smart movie, nor am I against science fiction that attempts to explore profound concepts and ideals. What I am against, however, is wasting my time with a tech lecture disguised as quality entertainment. Primer is obtuse, slow, convoluted, frustrating and pretentiously impenetrable. After finally finishing Primer, I scanned the DVD spine and noticed it said, “Thriller.” I laughed so hard I almost fell over. The only way Primer could be a thriller is because you’ll be racing the clock for it to finish.
Nate’s Grade: C-
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WRITER REFLECTIONS 20 YEARS LATER
I tried, dear reader. I had every intention of giving 2004’s Primer another chance, wanting to allow the distance of time to perhaps make the movie more palatable for my present-day self than it was when I was in my early twenties and irritated by this low-budget, high-concept Sundance DIY time travel indie. I thought with two decades of hindsight, I’d be able to find the brilliance that people cited back in 2004 where instead I only found maddening frustration. I consider myself a relatively intelligent individual, so I felt like I would be able to unpack what has been dubbed the most complex and realistic time travel movie ever created, let alone on a shoestring budget of only $7000, where the showcase was writer/director/star/editor/composer Shane Caruth’s intricate plotting. The whole intention with my re-watches is to give movies another chance and to honestly reflect upon why my feelings might have changed over time, for better or worse. That’s my intent, and while this day may have always been a matter of time for arriving, but I tried valiantly to watch Primer again and I quit. Yes, my apologies, but I tapped out.
I gave the movie twenty minutes before I came to the conclusion that I just wanted to do anything else with my time. I even tried watching a YouTube explanation video to give me a better summation, and even five minutes into that I came to the same conclusion that I wanted to do anything else with my fleeting sense of time. I think this is a case of accessibility and engagement.
Ultimately, this is the tale of two would-be inventors who keep reliving the same day to make money and win over a girl at a party. Reliving this day several times, with several iterations, and literally requiring a flowchart to keep it all together, is a lot of work for something that seemingly offers so little entertainment value beyond the academic pat on the back for being able to keep up with the inscrutable plotting. Look, I love time travel movies. I love the possibilities, the playfulness, the emphasis on ideas and casualty and imagination. I love the questions they raise and the dangers and, above all, the sheer fun. A time travel movie shouldn’t feel like you’re reading a book on arcane tax law. It needs to be, at the very least, interesting. Watching these two guys live out their lives, while on the peripheral more exciting things are happening with doubles, and we’re stuck with watching them migrate to this same party, or this same storage lockers and garages. It’s all so resoundingly low-stakes, even though betrayal and murder appear. I found this drama so powerfully uninteresting, and then structured and skewered and stacked to be an inscrutable, unknowable puzzle that makes you want to give up rather than engage. For me, there isn’t enough investment or intrigue to try and unpack this movie’s homework.
This is a lesson for me, as I have a newborn baby in my house, and sleep deprivation and fatigue are more a presence in my life, that I’m going to be more selective with what I choose to spend those moments of free time. Do I want to invest my time watching a movie I am not engaging with, that gives me so little to hold onto? When my friend Liz Dollard had her first child, she talked about not watching downer movies like 2016’s Manchester by the Sea, only having the emotional space for stories that wouldn’t be draining to her mental well-being. This meant low-stakes, uplifting, generally happy or familiar tales. I remember at the time thinking that she was willfully shuttling so many potential movies from her viewership, great films that could be challenging or depressing and deserving of being seen. Now, I completely get it, because after you’ve woken up several times during that night to feed a small child who has no means of communicating with you other than volcanic screaming, watching a long movie about human suffering can feel like a tall order. While Primer isn’t overwhelming as some kind of miserable dirge, it is too hard for me to access and gives me too little to hold onto.
As a film critic for over twenty-five years of my life, I try my best to thoughtfully analyze every movie I sit down to write about, and I try to think about potential audiences and the artistic intentions for them, and whether choices help or hinder those intentions. Not every movie is going to be for me just like any other work of media; there are countless musical artists that I will never willfully listen to but have their respective fan bases. I know there are people that love Primer, as hard as it is for me to fathom. I know there are people out there that leap to the challenge of keeping the nine iterations and timelines together as time confusingly folds upon itself. I know there are sci-fi enthusiasts that respect and appreciate the stripped-down, more “realistic” application of time travel. I know there are people who celebrate this movie, but I am not one of them. Primer is simply not for me, and that’s okay. Not every work of art will be for every person. I doubt I’ll ever come back to Primer again for the rest of my life, but there’s so many more movies to watch every day, so why spend precious time on a movie you’re just not clicking with?
Adios, Primer. To someone else, you’re a wonderful movie. To me, you’re, as I wrote in 2004, a “techno lecture” disguised as an impenetrable film exercise.
Re-View Grade: Undetermined
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It’s What’s Inside (2024)
This sneaky little movie is exactly what I’ve been asking for from low-budget genre cinema, where creative ingenuity and imagination are the dominant forces to offset budget limitations. It’s What’s Inside is ostensibly a body swap movie between a group of friends stuck in a mansion overnight. A device allows eight people to swap into other hosts, and it plays as a silly party game early, before writer/director Greg Jardin increases the stakes. People pretend to be someone else and then explore that freedom, which usually means having affairs and getting a little too comfortable in other people’s bodies. Then there are… complications, and watching the characters frantically debate their new challenges and limitations with growing mistrust, exasperation, and betrayal makes for a delicious 90 minutes of surprises. Because there are multiple rounds of body-swapping, and eight starting characters, Jardin takes particular points to better clarify identities, from characters wearing Polaroids to a red-tinted sort of x-ray showing the real characters underneath the confusing physical surface. All of it helps, though I still had to ask who was really who quite often. I think watching it a second time would make it more coherent but also give me even more appreciation for Jardin’s slippery, shifting screenwriting. Here is a movie with rampant intrigue and imagination to spare, that maximizes its creativity to tap the body swap as an illuminating and destructive device to explore secret insecurities, desires, jealousies, and dissatisfaction in a friends group. It’s a wild trip, elevated by energetic and helpful editing, where the ideas are the main feature. It might not be much more than a bad overnight stay with bad people but It’s What’s Inside is top-notch genre filmmaking. It’s what’s inside the movie that matters most, its big imagination and fulfilling execution. Greg Jardin, you have my full attention with whatever movies you want to make from here on out.
Nate’s Grade: A-
nathanzoebl 
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