The Lobster (2015)
6/10
The Michael Bay of "art" movies; unoriginal, superficial and boring.
29 October 2016
I like slow movies, I like (not exclusively) movies that are different, and I have enjoyed movies that were wacky just for the sake of it.

But this movie is just pointless. Just like a Michael Bay movie is a series of disjointed superficial action scenes, just there to show CGI and huge explosions, this movie is a series of disjointed "artsy" scenes, just to show the audience superficial weirdness, not even for the sake of it.

There is no depth to anything.

I see many people compare this movie to Wes Anderson's movies (as well as various other directors of similar genre). The problem is that these directors use certain framing, lighting, slow motion etc, and certain narrative techniques for a reason. They are there to tell you something, they set up some emotional connection, they tell you about a character, they set a mood important for the story, etc. etc.

Without going into spoilers, there is no point to many things in the movie. You can easily just leave many scenes, techniques and characters out, or rearrange them, it wouldn't make any difference, because they have no meaning. They are just randomly there to be weird character "A", and absurd situation "4". While other things are just cheap setups for cliché payoffs without any connection to the story or each other.

The more I think about this movie, the more superficial and flat it becomes. Some people call the movie pretentious, but it isn't even that. There is nothing there for it to be pretentious about.

I"m forced to give it some stars because the movie doesn't even do us the decency of being bad. The actors know how to act, the camera man knows how to operate the camera, and the man in the cutting room knows how to cut, the locations are well chosen, and the director directed. It's a well made piece of nothing.
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