Awesome Movie

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.

One of the most extraordinary films you will see this year. Take that as you want.

You have to give this movie a chance. Like you have to give torture a chance.

Not a patch on Wheatley's highpoint, Sightseers. It looks and sounds great and we could watch Sienna Miller in anything, but this badly needs a re-write. Just too damned obscure and aimless to be anything other than frustrating to watch.

JG Ballard's book High Rise is a dystopian masterpiece. It is a small book, less than 200 pages, in which words are used sparingly, and yet manages to paint vivid pictures in your head. It starts with Laing eating a dog, as if that was the natural conclusion of all the events that preceded it, and then takes you on that journey during which all human of all decency is replaced by tribal, basic survival instincts. Ben Wheatley's film is well acted and atmospheric. It is also wonderfully photographed and choreographed, but it ultimately fails to convince the audience about the inevitability of its ending. The pace is wrong. The audience is not shown the importance of the supermarket or the car incidents, and the tenants' behaviour spirals out of control too quickly to be believable. Everything happens in the first 45 minutes, so the remaining hour becomes dull and boring. The book was a dark portrayal of human nature. It convinces us that we are only a few bad incidents away from cold blooded murders and incest. The film is perhaps too faithful to the book to convey the same meaning. To me, it feels as though Wheatley respected the source material so much he failed to change it where necessary to accommodate a different medium. It's similar to what Linklater did with a scanner darkly (which I loved, but not as much as the book... of course), for which he seemed to take full scenes from the book without providing a meaningful synthesis. As someone who read the book and appreciated all the details, I still enjoyed watching the movie, and I am sure I will watch it again, but with a different mindset, considering it as a piece of art. But I can see why people who were not familiar with the material could not appreciate it, and I find it a real shame.

Watched this directors other films, not really impressed with how he blatantly rips off other movies and somehow is hailed as amazing. His films just look good, but don't actually deliver anything new. Formulaic and boring. Waiting for it to finish so I could write this. Style over substance, ben wheatley is selling snake oil. Don't buy the hype.