To quote a famous director: I reject your premise.Quoting Ezee E (view post)
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The ending elicited a shrug from me. The characters are so underwritten there's no particular stake in who is guilty or who isn't.
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To quote a famous director: I reject your premise.
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The ending elicited a shrug from me. The characters are so underwritten there's no particular stake in who is guilty or who isn't.
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Last edited by Irish; 03-23-2020 at 10:32 PM.
What in God's holy name are you blathering about?
The severed arm perfectly acquitted itself, because of the simplicity of its wishes and its total lack of doubt.
I thought this was where the movie was at its strongest, his presence was always there even if (almost) nothing happened. I kept looking at the confines of the screen, beyond the character of Moss which I normally don't do in a movie.
I guess he wanted to terrorize her, since for sure he could have struck the killing blow anytime he wanted. Maybe he simply enjoyed fooling around, maybe there's a reason why he worked in the field of optics, because that says something about who he is, what he enjoys doing. I think his master plan isn't to be trifled with. You can really mess up a person's life by sending fake emails or spreading lies in general. That shit can hit big, especially psychologically. And we can assume he didn't want to kill her anyway, otherwise she would have been dead already. He was abusive, not a killer. To me it made sense that he would make his presence known via banal actions, because going big in that regard might have resulted in a far more bombastic, generic affair. Although I do remember an imprint of a hand shown on a shower door in the trailer, but I didn't see that in the movie, or I missed it.
Or maybe it was the brother all along, because there would not be that prior animosity between husband and wife, so he would have been more prone to just act like a dick and have simple fun with the suit in the beginning, until things escalated I guess.
[+] closer to next rating / [-] closer to previous rating
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I have yet to see anyone prove that the ex was behind any of what happened, except that he was abusive prior to the movie.
I don't think this film is that tightly written on a scene-by-scene basis, but seeing comments like this proves Whannell's concept and general storyline pretty ingenious for a horror film, really, because it's so analogous to the real world phenomenon of gaslighting viewed from a potentially disbelieving outsider perspective.
If Tom is the only responsible one, why in the world would he come to her with the deal to help get the charges dropped if she returned to Adrian? By that point, he almost got the money anyway, and he didn't benefit anything from that gesture if her charges were dropped (I don't remember the exact money cause, but it might potentially open a loophole that didn't make it go well for him), except getting her unborn kid to be with his supposedly-in-the-basement brother.
And even with Whannell not being 100% clear to keep with the gaslighting theme, the "that shouldn't come as a.... (pregnant (sorry) pause) ... surprise" sentence, with the last word changing in tone and pronunciation to be the same as the ones she heard whisper to throughout the film, is a big enough purposeful dot that Whannell seems to trust to be connected by the audience.
Midnight Run (1988) - 9
The Smiling Lieutenant (1931) - 8.5
The Adventures of Robinhood (1938) - 8
Sisters (1973) - 6.5
Shin Godzilla (2016) - 7.5
In a horrror sci-fi fantasy that stacks implausibility like cordwood, you want ... proof? ... of something?
I'm waiting.
Torn on this. I was digging it up until the restaurant scene with the floating knife. Will end up sleeping on it I suppose.
The great opening scene is such an effective blend of real-world thematic richness and masterful horror directing, which makes it a slight disappointment that apart from the closing sequence, the rest of the film doesn't have that nuanced balance. Only Moss retains that richness, while on a scene-by-scene basis the film retreats to a more generic, first-draft horror writing/characterization, at times making it hard for suspension of disbelief and bloating the running time to two hours. But Whannell's use of silence and space is sharp throughout, with expert tension-and-release rhythm, and Moss really just elevates the whole thing. 7.5/10
Midnight Run (1988) - 9
The Smiling Lieutenant (1931) - 8.5
The Adventures of Robinhood (1938) - 8
Sisters (1973) - 6.5
Shin Godzilla (2016) - 7.5
Oh please. What are you an Academy Award voter? Spare me with your snobbery and genre bias. Leigh Whannell is a smart guy and a sharp director. Upgrade is one of the best action/sci-fi/gritty genre pictures of the last five years or so.
Ratings on a 1-10 scale for your pleasure:
Top Gun: Maverick - 8
Top Gun - 7
McCabe & Mrs. Miller - 8
Crimes of the Future - 8
Videodrome - 9
Valley Girl - 8
Summer of '42 - 7
In the Line of Fire - 8
Passenger 57 - 7
Everything Everywhere All at Once - 6
Huh? Your seeing snobbery where there is none.
Blum and Whannell are smart and talented but neither one of them is interested in sending messages. If you look at either one of their filmographies, this bears out.
They aren't interested in moral complexity. They are interested in pure entertainment. In reaching the widest audience possible. You don't do that with nuance, especially not these days, where everything at the multiplex has an obvious villain with clearly defined motivations, and probably not in something that desires to be a legit "Universal horror film."
This stuff is meant to be fun and frivolous. There's nothing wrong with that. We don't need to always ascribe complexities and meaning to genre work. Let it be what it is, not what you imagine it to be.
(In this case, that's still a terrible movie, but you get what I'm saying.)
Hey, this was pretty good! I thought it did a nice job of updating a classic Universal monster to modern times and themes (and the Griffin described by H.G. Wells was always a bit of a megalomaniac asshole) and the writing was actually pretty sharp. I also noticed what was already mentioned in the thread about the gas-lighting theme being mirrored in the interactions between characters, but I wouldn't take it as far as to mistrust the ending. I took it as face value, and the "surprise" line as the dramatic confirmation to me that Griffin was (of course) behind everything all along. The other theories are fun to entertain, though. Whannell remains one of the great genre creators of the new generations.
By the way, it didn't bother me in the least that the Invisible Man's first attacks were petty stuff like ruining a breakfast or sending fake e-mails. The guy is supposed to be a spurned abusive boyfriend and, besides, it's typical of a Horror film to start small and then escalate towards the gruesome.
So there were at least two suits right? She had just been attacked when she went back to his house and found a suit there. Two suits, two brothers.
There's another theory, that both were simultaneously attacking her?
Would just have to figure out where the BF got damaged.
The people on here saying Adrian wasn't involved are crazy.
That's just silly, RT level craziness and needless contrarianism.
Prove it!
Where do I begin?
First off we clearly hear Adrian's voice multiple times while he's invisible. Pretty sure there was no "voice modulation" part of the suit.
When the lawyer brother meets with Cee at the mental institution he lowers he voice to tell her that all of this is being done to her by him and Adrian and that it will stop if she goes back to him. Why would the brother care if she goes back to him? He has no motive for them to be together.
The most obvious one is that there are obviously 2 attackers at multiple points in the film, the clearest being at the end. Both Cee and James experience attacks from two places at once.
Annnnnnd finally...the use of the word "surprise".
Adrian says this to her and looks right in her eyes when he says it, at the end dinner table scene. He does this to let her know it was him. Because this is what he said to her when he was with her in the mental institution.
It was Adrian working in tandem with his brother.
I need to watch it again, but that's good evidence.
Not to mention how absolutely gross it would be to have him be "innocent" at the end, and she's a murderer.
That would take it from a really cool ending of female empowerment and overcoming an abuser, to something that feels written by an MRA with an underlying message of "bitches be crazy".
There's no way they would do that. Not today.
I agree with you but I do find it disturbing that one half of your argument is that it would undermine the movie's intent, but the other half is that they wouldn't dare do it or they would be lynched.
Isn't it kind of weird that murder is an acceptable response?
If someone kills my sister, I am going to kill them.
Yes. Perfectly acceptable.
lol, forgot about that....
I dont see whats disturbing about that.
They would be "lynched" (your words, not mine). And rightfully so.
Hahah that's precisely what I find disturbing.
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