Although some have criticized the film’s choice to have white actors portray nonwhite characters in various eras (and, in fairness, nonwhite actors as white characters) as unnecessary given the lack of thematic links between the characters each actor portrays, that was never the point – instead, the point of using the same actors repeatedly, I think, is to provide a grounding sense of unity between the six timeframes the movie is set in, as the storytelling of the editing choices (and I think shifting from the book’s “nested” stories was necessary to make it work on film at all) is jarring as it is; in any case, I have said before I will take a dozen ambitious failures over one unambitious, repetitive “success,” and so this movie gets my support for if it is indeed a failure, it is only barely one, and I do not think I concede even that (and yes, this may be a run-on sentence, but it is a run-on movie, so there).
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Only jarring at first, I believe. Once you get a feel for the flow of the eras and the characters that inhabit them, it becomes less about figuring out what’s going on and more about how they’re all going to fit together. I enjoyed it! And the Neo Seoul pieces make me hopeful for what a Neuromancer or Bubblegum Crisis film could someday look like.
When I saw the trailer, it struck me as a more grandiose version of Cafe de Flore. Although I suppose that it’s not entirely fair to criticize it on those grounds, since basically any story is going to retread the same thematic ground as another once in awhile.
Single sentence review of your single sentence review: like so much of your recent single sentence work, it displays a lack of understanding of the trumping importance of tight editing in this particular (sub)medium.
Single-raspberry review of highlyverbal’s single-sentence review: THRRRRRRRRRP
I saw the movie this weekend, and I loved it. I’m curious about how it’ll compare to the book.
I actually view the movie as a qualified success, and I think the makeup was terrible. Not because of the racial ramifications of putting so many white actors in Korean roles; because I spent way too much of the movie with Harry S. Plinkett echoing in my head. “What’s WRONG with your faaaaace?”
The valleys in the Neo Seoul sequence were pretty uncanny, true.
After thinking about it, I would have to call this Grant Morrison: The Movie.
Because c’mon. It totally is.
maybe it’s less jarring to you ‘cos you’re white, but casting nonwhite actors as white characters – not even remotely the same as casting white actors in yellowface.
At no point did I say the two were equivalent.