While I think some people were harsher on this movie than they had to be, I think some of the scorn is earned. It was slow, and not in the way that suggests it was trying to be an artsy movie with ‘feelings’. It was slow because we followed a character that was either 1. Supposed to be mundane as hell and look sick all the time. or 2. There were multiple mistakes starting with makeup, taking a stroll through the acting, and then sliding home right in the director’s lap.
I’m not trying to complain about the actress. She’s a beautiful woman with, I’m sure, better acting skills than what was used in this movie. But there were elements that just didn’t work. At first, I wondered about her alcoholism but by the end, that started to make sense. But what was taken TOO FAR was how sick she looked all the time. I spent 2/3 of the movie thinking she had cancer and it just hadn’t been divulged yet. Then there was the weird yearning/sad look on her face all the time.
I understand that her character is sad and feels out of place. I understand that this movie is meant to slowly show us that. But it was too much in the wrong places. It would have done better to have select scenes that showed us the loneliness and then other scenes where she looked engaged and intelligent. Like she was thinking something other than ‘Sad Sad Sad Sad Sad’. I think this whole thing was likely better as a book and we lost a lot of internal dialog along the way. So maybe I can blame whoever the screenwriter was for some of this mess.
As it was, nothing made sense until the last five minutes and the journey to get there…wasn’t worth the time lost. The end doesn’t feel clever. It doesn’t feel horrific. It just was finally over and I think all of us felt relief at that, but not because we sympathized with the aliens. It was because we had been held hostage for 109 minutes.
https://letterboxd.com/susyq918/film/risen-2021/