- Release Date: January 25th, 2011
- MSRP: 29.98 (Blu) 24.98 (DVD)
- Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1
- Year: 2009
- Language: English
- Directed by Gaspar Noe
Here's something I've been aching to watch for a while. I was never a huge fan of Gaspar Noe's film, Irreversible. While it was a decent flick, it was something that was more based on visuals and didn't care enough about the story causing the last hour to be incredibly dull. That is the case with Enter the Void. The movie follows Oscar, an American man currently living with his sister in Tokyo, Japan, who gets pulled into selling drugs. Once he gets ratted out he ends up shot and dead on a bathroom floor. For the rest of the movie we follow his point of view as he either has flashbacks to his life leading up to now to him flying over Tokyo watching over the people who have had an impact in his life (all of which are either shown through his eyes or filmed directly from the back of his head).
The first hour of Enter the Void is amazing. Though it gets slow in scenes, it's still incredible to watch Oscar go about his night leading to his death, and then getting to view his haunting past first person. After the first hour it starts the process of showing Oscar either fly around Tokyo watching over the people in his life or flying straight into something resembling, light, life, or death. This last hour and a half becomes so repetitive, with both visuals and story that it becomes dull, which is something hard to imagine with a movie like this. The visuals are stunning at first, but they get so overused. We get the some shots of flying over Tokyo over and over again to the point where they take up 1/4th of the last hour. The same goes for the shots flying into lights or holes as transitions. This begins to take up more time than the actual story itself. Maybe if it wasn't so overused I wouldn't mind so much.
The whole movies is basically summed up in a conversation describing the
Tibetan Book of the Dead between Oscar and his closest friend. This along with the countless repetitive transitions leaves you knowing exactly how this is going to end. The transitions aren't the only thing repetitive either. During an incredibly powerful flashback sequence in the beginning we see the death of Oscar's parents which is very affective. This gets repeated along with several other images way too much.
Though it sounds like I may hate this movie, I still like it to an extent. It's not something I would watch over and over again, and while it may do something amazing style wise, to sum it up story wise, it's a re-imagining of Stanley Kubrick's
2001: a Space Odyssey (Which Noe has admitted to taking major inspiration from). Like I said I love the first hour of this movie, but it started to lose me during the last hour. This also has one of the most tedious scenes I've seen in a while. There is a scene in a motel towards the end that lingers on longer than any other scene in this movie that could have been cut down to less than five minutes and still have kept the meaning. That's the case with most of this movie. It could have been cut down to an hour and forty minutes and still have been effective.
Overall, I don't exactly know how to rate this. I like Enter the Void, but not love it. If I can cheat and throw in a little fast forwarding action, I'd still rate it at a 7/10. It's on par with Irreversible; it's an interesting experiment, but as an overall movie it's only decent. Oh and as for a quick review of the US Blu-Ray disc, the movie looks beautiful but there are barely any decent extras.
The first hour of Enter the Void is amazing. Though it gets slow in scenes, it's still incredible to watch Oscar go about his night leading to his death, and then getting to view his haunting past first person. After the first hour it starts the process of showing Oscar either fly around Tokyo watching over the people in his life or flying straight into something resembling, light, life, or death. This last hour and a half becomes so repetitive, with both visuals and story that it becomes dull, which is something hard to imagine with a movie like this. The visuals are stunning at first, but they get so overused. We get the some shots of flying over Tokyo over and over again to the point where they take up 1/4th of the last hour. The same goes for the shots flying into lights or holes as transitions. This begins to take up more time than the actual story itself. Maybe if it wasn't so overused I wouldn't mind so much.
The whole movies is basically summed up in a conversation describing the Tibetan Book of the Dead between Oscar and his closest friend. This along with the countless repetitive transitions leaves you knowing exactly how this is going to end. The transitions aren't the only thing repetitive either. During an incredibly powerful flashback sequence in the beginning we see the death of Oscar's parents which is very affective. This gets repeated along with several other images way too much.
Though it sounds like I may hate this movie, I still like it to an extent. It's not something I would watch over and over again, and while it may do something amazing style wise, to sum it up story wise, it's a re-imagining of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: a Space Odyssey (Which Noe has admitted to taking major inspiration from). Like I said I love the first hour of this movie, but it started to lose me during the last hour. This also has one of the most tedious scenes I've seen in a while. There is a scene in a motel towards the end that lingers on longer than any other scene in this movie that could have been cut down to less than five minutes and still have kept the meaning. That's the case with most of this movie. It could have been cut down to an hour and forty minutes and still have been effective.
Overall, I don't exactly know how to rate this. I like Enter the Void, but not love it. If I can cheat and throw in a little fast forwarding action, I'd still rate it at a 7/10. It's on par with Irreversible; it's an interesting experiment, but as an overall movie it's only decent. Oh and as for a quick review of the US Blu-Ray disc, the movie looks beautiful but there are barely any decent extras.
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