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Doomed By a Slow Start ... to be Way Underrated

posted 10 years ago by emvan
5 replies | jump to latest

I think that nearly all of the criticism levied against this movie is completely true of the first third (roughly the first act, although it doesn't have a clear three-act structure). They take an interesting premise and go nowhere with it, and everything is dark and looks like crap.

And then, out of nowhere, there's a great scene with Maggie and her dad, discussing her Mom, and then a great scene with her friend Allie and their other friends, and a great, tense scene with her boyfriend who is just "turning" ... the last two thirds of the movie, in fact, is really very, very good.

This movie wants to be for zombies what Let the Right One In was for vampires ... a movie that appeals to arthouse fans who have no interest in horror and to horror fans who don't watch arthouse. It ends up, I think, being a movie that will only be liked by:

1) Fans of both arthouse and horror, who are also

2) People who don't give up on a movie that has an underwhelming start. I see this a lot -- when a movie starts slow, some people's brains start to see everything through the filter of their having already decided the movie isn't good. (Code 46 is another example.) So even if the movie starts being really good, they've checked out.

Had some of the stronger sequences happened right after Maggie came home, this may have been much more successful with critics and audiences. (If I were producing, I'd also suggest they try lighting it brightly -- making everything look ordinary might have been quite effective, and would have been much easier to watch.)

Prepare your minds for a new scale of physical, scientific values, gentlemen.

[–] clemenbroog_21 10 years ago

I like both horror and arthouse films, wish there were more films like Let the right one in, and have no problem with slow movies, but something about Maggie just didn't work for me. I think it had excellent potential, but neither the horror or the drama elements were satisfying. This was an ambitious movie and I think it was certainly worth making but for me personally it wasn't a great example of horror and drama working together. The horror elements got in the way of establishing the characters and made the acting unconvincing because the script couldn't support the drama. However I would like to see more filmmakers try to make movies like this in the future. Also I agree with you that they should have tried brightening things up to look more natural, I'm not a fan of visually dark movies myself.

[–] ilon 10 years ago

Well, I like horror and arthouse films and I liked this one. In fact, I know I'll end up watching it a couple more times at least.

Not everyones coup of tea, sure, but that's what the world it's like.

The good thing is... you don't really know who is going to love it, so it makes more fun to suggest it to anyone :)

[–] shanayneigh 10 years ago

This movie wants to be for zombies what Let the Right One In was for vampires ... a movie that appeals to arthouse fans who have no interest in horror and to horror fans who don't watch arthouse.

It's funny you should mention Let the Right One In. Thematically, Maggie reminded me in part of Handling the Undead by the same author.

Working in the movie business since -92

[–] Seth_Rogue_One 10 years ago

Slow start? The whole movie was slow, if there's one movie that you should give up on if you hate it from the beginning it's this one, it has no pay off at the end

I didn't hate it though but not a big fan either

For us, there is no spring. Just the wind that smells fresh before the storm.

[–] emvan 10 years ago

I think you've demonstrated my point -- that some people never recover from hating a movie whose first third is lousy. I didn't hate it, but I don't tend to hate movies at all. I just thought it wasn't good at all. It's an objective truth that our subjective experiences diverged from that point onward. You continued not to like it much, I thought the rest was really good. Obviously that's in our respective brains and not the movie; but I know for certain that there was tons for me to like in the last two-thirds (which I mentioned in the original post). And I'm sorry that you were so soured by the lame beginning that (for whatever hard-wired reason) you couldn't appreciate how good it actually was from that point onward. You can't possibly think a movie scene is good if you have decided, before it begins, that it's going to be bad ... and I admit that if the movie has been bad up to that point, that's not an unreasonable belief to have,

There are very good evolutionary reasons why some (probably most) people don't change their minds too easily, especially changing 180 degrees. There aren't too many things in life whose first third sucks and whose last two-thirds are really good. You'd be hard-pressed, in fact, to think of another example. But perhaps if people kept an active open mind about the possibility of any bad movie getting better along the way, they would end up enjoying movies even more than they already do.

Prepare your minds for a new scale of physical, scientific values, gentlemen.