"It's impossible to have any connection when you know nothing about the characters, specially him, who is the emptiest character I've seen in a movie in a looong time."
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Respectfully, I feel differently about this. In movies, (which are typically under 2 hours), you only have so much time to truly get to know ANY character. It's not like episodic TV series....where you have the time over the course of an entire season to get to know the characters in a fully fleshed-out way. With movies, you typically only get to learn a few brief highlights of each character....and it's more about the story/action that is unfolding in front of us (rather than being about what kind of childhood each person had). And in this movie in particular, two strangers cross paths during an alien invasion....so they don't have time (or need) to get to know each other. In that sense, the audience is in the same boat: We only learn what is needed, and we learn only the same things (at the same time) as the 2 characters themselves learn about each other. It works perfectly.
The writer aqnd director will provide you only with a few key nuggets that they WANT you to know. And only nuggets that serve the story. The rest if either irrelevant, or.....the rest is up to our own interpretation.
In this movie, very little information was needed regarding the two main characters. However (ironically)...in a movie with VERY little dialogue, we learn quite a bit. (Certainly ENOUGH). We learn that Sam is dying and has no immediate family left. She lives in hospice, has very little time left, has chronic, managed pain, has cancer, is an introvert who keeps to herself....has a nurse/case manager who genuinely cares for her....has an affinity for the city (and Patsy's Pizza)....her father was a jazz musician and she loved when he'd take her to gigs....she's strong and independent....she's stoic....a loner....is selfless.....loves her cat--her only companion left in her world at the hospice home, etc, etc....
Regarding Eric, who we don't meet until about 40 minutes in....we learn he is from oversees...a law student....alone in this country...feeling very frightened and lost as things unfold...he has some talent as a magician....he is extremely caring and thoughtful....and also quite selfless (taking such a HUGE risk to find Sam some meds).....is braqve when he needs to be, especially when it comes to helping someone else, etc, etc....
We learn quite a bit about them, certainly enough. And that's part of the magic and irony. We learn all of that in a movie where there is almost no talking.
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DavidM (875)
4 months ago
We know absolutely nothing about him. He is just a Guy Who, in the middle of an apocalipsis ( btw, It looks everyone knows inmediately what's happening and how the creatures work, like if they had seen the previous movies), starts following a cat and Lupita like if she was Schwarzenegger or The rock. 0 sense.
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Ripkens25 (2014)
4 months ago
He was following her because he was in shock after just having been knocked unconscious and burried. He was clearly altered and terrified. Who knows how people would act in that situation. He was in a mental fog.
The people in the streets, in general, were NOT acting like they knew what to do. Most of them were getting demolished. Eventually, it was easy to figure out the creatured keyed-in on sound.
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DavidM (875)
4 months ago
"Who knows how people would act in that situation" is the worst way to justify an absurd behaviour.
They all inmediately knew that sound attracted the creatures, and in less than one day Lupita had figured that if you are near a fountain the creatures can't hear you. The army also figured out what attracts them, so it doesn't make any sense these aliens could win so many ground before being annihilated.
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Ripkens25 (2014)
4 months ago
"Who knows how people would act in that situation" is the worst way to justify an absurd behaviour.
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No it is not. You're criticizing how Eric was acting....during an alien invasion, after awakening from a concussion, induced by being buried alive. You don't know how you would react or act in the fog of all that, nor do I. In a movie like this, criticizing how people react is rather silly. You just have to accept certain things and move on, or you'll spend 2 hours micro-analyzing an alien invasion movie.
And I could easily understand and forgive the fact that the aliens gained so much ground so quickly. We don't know how many of them there were, it was a surprise ambush, and they moved/killed with lightning speed. It would take armed forces time to mobilize and figure out what they were dealing with.
I think I'm done here. It sounds like this movie just isn't for you. To each their own.
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DavidM (875)
4 months ago
He was underwater, not buried alive. And no, no one would act as he does, and the movie doesn't explain It either.
And with the info we had about the creatures the army would kill them in two days. The mission of this movie was explaining what happened, if they were part of a bigger alien invasión, not making yet another intimist drama with even less sense than the two previous movies.
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