This morning I watched a movie that came from the production company of Amazon. Now I will be honest, I have an affinity for movies and TV shows that are created and put out under the Amazon umbrella. Mainly this is because every one always had Netflix, but I was not willing to get Netflix, so for a very long time I rode only with Amazon, but this movie took a large chunk of my respect for them away, and the movie is The Vast of Night. It is the story about a small town in New Mexico in the 1950s that has strange encounters that some alleged to be aliens. Now just going off of the brief description of the movie, I was in, I felt like this could be a good watch, but it was not even worthwhile, and it would have been better as a podcast or even a book.
The main area where this movie went wrong that others do so well in, is in the creating of suspense. There is almost no suspense created during the movie, and it is not for a lack of trying. There are multiple scenes where they try to elicit the reaction that will get the viewer on the edge of their seat, but they completely fail at doing so. There is almost no action in the movie at all. Most of the scenes just include long swathes of dialogue of the same two characters going back and forth. This is what leads me to believe that the movie would work better as a podcast. I feel like if I had just closed my eyes and listened to the movie instead of watching it, my experience would have been just about the same. The dialogue is very narratorial in nature, the characters seem to be explaining what they are doing constantly, so with extraordinarily little added narration this could easily have worked as an alien conspiracy podcast. Not to mention that the narrators in the horror podcasts add to the suspense and chill that the stories create, so it would almost undoubtedly of been better as a podcast.
This movie was the worst version of Signs, M. Night Shyamalan’s alien film from the early 2000s. His story was much more expansive, and the alien invasion was worldwide, but the suspense he was able to create from the unknown was vastly better and more impressive than this movie. The Vast of Night was described as a Sci-Fi, drama, and suspense film, but the only word of that that has any accuracy is Sci-Fi. The amazing thing is, the acting in the movie is not bad, the chemistry between the two main characters is good, there is some weird tension between the two of them, but it does not detract from the movie, it is just the writing of the movie that really takes away its ability to be good.
There are some redeeming qualities of the movie, but they do not involve the story. They film it in a way that gives it a more retro feel. They pull these elements in well. The way the movie starts, the movie is showing on an old tv like it was an afternoon special. When they immerse you into the world, the shots have that old grainy feel that I feel like adds to the movie and the establishment of the period. Finally, towards the beginning of the movie, they use long tracking shots without any visible cuts to the audience, like what they did in 1917, they just do not do it for the whole movie. There are two specific shots where they are establishing the setting of the town where they track from the phone operator center, to the high school gym, where the majority of the town is, and then they track to the radio station. They way they did and the nighttime elements just showed beautifully, I just wish that they could have had a more engaging story. There were multiple times in the movie where the camera was on one person’s face as they talked on the phone for at least ten minutes, the shot did not change at all, and in these instances, the main person talking is on the other end of the phone, so they are not even in the shot, so the viewer is just watching the person listen.
I gave this movie a 10 out of 100 due to its failure to create any sort of suspense. The filming was done well, but the story was not executed to its fullest extent. Somehow it received 92 on Rotten Tomatoes, a 67 on IMDb, and an 84 on Metacritic. I can not see how this could possibly be ranked over a 50, so I would not recommend the watch, but apparently there is a large variability on opinion, so you might see it differently.
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