I went with my wife to see Wind River on a recommendation of a friend who is usually quite reliable. It has a very high rating on IMDB and RT, and it sounded like the subject matter was very interesting, so I went in with high hopes. It didn't work for me, at all. Even purely technically, it was atrocious - terrible camera work, horrific framing - I mean, I've rarely seen framing done so badly, where you have something sticking in the foreground at the side of the frame, out of focus and super distracting, which transpires to be a tree stump, while you're supposed to concentrate on the body of the victim being examined. Shaky cam for no good reason and random. Super irritating and made it hard to watch. At least I was hoping for some nice DP work with snow and wide open vistas, which is why I decided to see it in a theater. Unfortunately, it never delivered on that front either despite a few half-hearted attempts before the inevitable clumsy cut to medium shots with no sense of fluidity. Horrible clumsy music, and everything badly mixed, loud background sounds so often you can't hear the dialogue, which was in turn frequently delivered listlessly and incompetently (like the opening sequence VO). Hamfisted acting (Elizabeth Olsen was hopeless as an FBI agent) and pretentious fake "deep" observations in dialogue that were just cringe-inducing, alternating with shameless unmotivated exposition.
Draggy as heck - long boring stretches which were meant to be portentious, but which simply underlined the absence of dramatic tension. By the numbers scene setups that you could see a mile away, done with no imagination, that came across like an insult... "now watch how DAD is teaching his SON to be a MAN by mastering a HORSE" - set pieces which exist only to get another box checked off in a flat-footed narrative. Everything is telegraphed and standard issue. Not an original interaction in the whole film. Wooden puppets have more life and reality to them. None of it rings true, every line and every situation is taken not from life, but from bad movies cliches that have been driven into the ground 50 years ago. And the painfully bad acting, so many to choose from - James Jordan being especially horrible. The film felt like a boring greyhound trip fuelled by stale sandwiches and body odor. I can't believe it has such a reputation. But of course, it's just my one person opinion (although my wife hated it too), so I'm sure YMMV.
Draggy as heck - long boring stretches which were meant to be portentious, but which simply underlined the absence of dramatic tension. By the numbers scene setups that you could see a mile away, done with no imagination, that came across like an insult... "now watch how DAD is teaching his SON to be a MAN by mastering a HORSE" - set pieces which exist only to get another box checked off in a flat-footed narrative. Everything is telegraphed and standard issue. Not an original interaction in the whole film. Wooden puppets have more life and reality to them. None of it rings true, every line and every situation is taken not from life, but from bad movies cliches that have been driven into the ground 50 years ago. And the painfully bad acting, so many to choose from - James Jordan being especially horrible. The film felt like a boring greyhound trip fuelled by stale sandwiches and body odor. I can't believe it has such a reputation. But of course, it's just my one person opinion (although my wife hated it too), so I'm sure YMMV.
