Wow! This was so much fun! Until like… the last twenty minutes?
Spoilers are now going to follow. Do not read this if you want to watch the movie, because it’s a fun movie, and what I’m going to write here is going to spoil everything good about the movie. So here’s the logo a bunch of times to provide some spoiler space:
OK? Now there’s spoilers.
First of all it was so obvious the they were playing games with the pods, so when the big reveal at the end was happening, I was rolling my eyes so hard that my eyeballs fell out, and now I am literally blind.
Second of all: If you think about the premise just a millisecond: They grew the hostile alien from a single cell. Which means that this isn’t Alien, which it’s kinda similar to. You don’t want a Xenomorph landing on Earth, but the monster growing from a single cell makes everything irrelevant: Once that happens, there’s no way to be safe without plunging the space station into the Sun, and perhaps even that’s not enough.
In any case: They were all dead already, and nothing they did in the movie mattered.
So it’s a conceptual failure, but it’s so exciting to watch. It’s like a version of Alien without any political framework. That’s both good and bad: Alien had a lot to say about corporations and stuff, and this one is just pure, mindless entertainment, trying to offend nobody.
I bought all of Lynch’s movies the other year on bluray. Of course I’d seen them all before, but I thought it’d be fun to watch them all again. And, indeed, it was.
Fun, that is.
But I resisted watching The Elephant Man, and I didn’t want to watch The Straight Story, either. The first because I seemed to remember it being kinda bad, and the second, because I seemed to remember that it wasn’t… all that interesting? It’s Lynch’s Disney movie?
So why not watch them both the same evening?
[forty minutes pass]
This is just the heart-warmingest movie ever.
[the end]
I was totally on board for the first third of this movie. I was wondering why I didn’t remember this as a totally wonderful movie: Farnsworth is perfect as the old guy (amazing casting), and I was sobbing all over the place.
But… then it all kinda dissipated? Not that any scene in particular was bad or anything, but the momentum seemed to disappear. And this is a road movie.
So I got a really fancy edition of this movie. It’s on 4K, and a book, and a bunch of extras.
And a pop-up cathedral!
I guess! Very fancy indeed.
But the thing is… I’m not really looking forward to watching this? I mean, I don’t remember anything much from this movie, except the guy with the head moving around on stage er on the set, and that’s it. Except that I didn’t like it when I saw it as a (young) teenager, and I’ve never seen it since.
On the other hand, it’s David Lynch. It’s got John Hurt. John Hurt!!! How bad can this be?
It’s Karl Urban!
[forty minutes pass]
I’m not sure what I think of this movie now. It’s got a bunch of (what would become) standard Lynch bits, like the constant ever-shifting drones in every scene… but it also seems kinda jejune: By withholding showing Merrick to the movie audience for such a long time, Lynch is obviously making a commentary on how we, the audience, is just as complicit in the sideshow as those horrible characters gasping at Merrick on screen.
It’s so deep.
But then when Lynch finally does show him, it’s as a big anticlimax, which is (again) a tweaking of the audiences’ noses, but… it kinda works?
[thirty minutes pass]
Lynch is so good at manipulating the audience. Yes, it’s got all the beats and depth of a TV melodrama, but he does it so well.
[the end]
Man, that last bit of this movie is brutal. I mean… brutally boring. The entire kidnapping thing just felt so unnecessary, but I guess without it, there would be even less of a plot here than it is. It would basically be… “doctor finds ugly guy and then everybody in the audience cries a bit”.
I kept asking myself what the film was really trying to say about the human condition as reflected by John Merrick, and I kept drawing blanks. The film’s philosophy is this shallow: (1)Wow, the Elephant Man sure looked hideous, and (2)gosh, isn’t it wonderful how he kept on in spite of everything?
[…]
The direction, by David (Eraserhead) Lynch, is com-petent, although he gives us an inexcusable opening scene in which Merrick’s mother is trampled or scared by elephants or raped_who knows?_and an equally idiotic closing scene in which Merrick becomes the Star Child from 2001, or something.
He seems personally offended! Tee hee. That almost makes me like the movie more.
I was surprised by how much I like the first half of this movie, and I was thinking that my teenage self was a total moron. And then the last half… happened… and then I understood why I didn’t like it back then.
Is this Lynch’s most mainstream movie? It could be…
StudioCanal has done a great restoration and 4K transfer job. This bluray looks really good.
…
There’s like hours of extras on this bluray!
The first one is pretty traditional…
Heh: “When it was shown in Japan, it did so well in Japan that…
well, I think it’s the only reason that I saw any money on the backend
of it because there wasn’t time to hide it.”
Heh heh. He also talks about the Oscars and how you have to go campaigning if you want to get one, and how that’s repulsive to him. So the movie got eight nominations and not a single win.
“Film! It’s ancient technology! I’d die if I’d have to work with celluloid again.”
