Disclaimer: I know several of the cast and crew attached to this project. I'd like to state my honest opinion about this film, but before I do, I want everyone to know not to take anything I say personally. I am here to support you all and want to see you all to succeed in this industry. I've got no beef with anyone involved and I'm not on IMDb to be a hater of films.
While I have not heard great things about this film, I care too much to form my own opinion about it than to not watch it. It is of my opinion that this film was not made with an audience in mind. It seems like everyone had a great time filming from all the bts and clips I've seen on social media. But the movie as a whole just didn't work for me.
Bird, Lake and Fallor were the standout performers of the movie maybe due to proper casting but also, and this may be a coincidence, perhaps their limited screen time. Others had shining moments but also felt disconnected with their roles at times, and this for me was mostly due to improper casting and writing, not bad acting.
The storytelling was hard to follow and the script could probably use rewrites. But the major flaw with this movie was within the edit itself. The movie felt like I was watching a 90 minute trailer, not a movie. Because of the overuse of transitions and epic music throughout, I was lost at what was happening. Some scenes even felt more like a soap opera or rom com, which made the movie seem like it didn't know its own genre. And some earlier scenes were ending just as fast as they started, before I could even get a sense of what was going on. Some dialogue was hard to hear and was spoken too quickly even for reading subtitles.
The beginning was some of the worse green screen chroma key edits I've seen and it was really disappointing for all the experience put into such a massive project. I can only imagine the number of times "fix it in post" was said on set only to see the bandaid work done just didn't come together. I understand it's a debut film, but it could've been and probably should've been a lot better if more experience in this department had been sought out.
Micro budget films really have a hard time holding attention spans as long as Hollywood blockbusters. A 90 minute movie should not feel like 90 minutes or longer. This is another example of a film that was too long to expect audiences to sit through. This movie should not have been longer than it needs to tell the story and in my honest opinion, this entire story could be told in under 60 minutes, perhaps even 30-40 minutes. There just wasn't enough to hold my attention from start too finish for that kinda runtime.
I hope this team learns from this project what improvements they can put into their next one. But the audience attention has to be the priority here and that requires quality control with excellent pacing. Thanks for reading my thoughts.
