Shane Carruth

The Starburst patterns are a bit difficult to illustrate via text but it’s also hard to buy he’d be able to draw an afterimage from looking at the sun and have it match. There’s very little dialogue which is good storytelling but we don’t get to learn much about the characters themselves because of this. The little dialogue there is in act 2 doesn’t seem believable for kids. The scene structure is disjointed and feels fast paced even though the film is so long, it just seems like rapid fire images one after the other. There are also too many characters which could be consolidated into one. The lore is very deep and I appreciate how little is explained but it’s not marketable to mainstream audiences. The ending really is exciting though, and well worth all the painful buildup.

The structure is interesting but I’m not sure how useful it was. I like how the first half is one set of characters and then it switches gears entirely, it gives a lot of whiplash, but it doesn’t tie together satisfactorily. The story is confusing which I know is Shane Carruth’s trademark, but the reputation of this screenplay is much more than it deserves: people talk about it as if its a modern Ulysses, lots of depth and takes a lot of work to comprehend. The latter is definitely true but that lies in the details: at its simplest, the story is about a man who’s trying to find something, some kids who find it and build stuff out of it, and it destroys the universe like some kind of interplanetary invasive species. Interesting premise but more parallels could have been drawn to connect the parts, and at times it seemed like it was confusing just to be confusing, which was frustrating.

Ultimately it just felt like if Pokemon met Stranger Things met Arrival, but way more complicated than it needed to be.
… (altro)