The Beyond
The movie The Beyond consists of some nice CGI-imigary alternating with utterly poor and boring interviews with people explaining or commenting on what they/we just saw. Humanity has just experienced two mind-blowing events, a wormhole appearing in Earth's orbit and hundreds of huge, black, indestructible, threatening spheres hovering only a few hundred meters over the ground, spreading fear. A major, though classified, breakthrough in science. A person (I don't remember the name and do indeed not care) has made the ultimate sacrifice to make a dangerous journey from which there might be no return. Altogether potentially fantastic stuff. One thing potentially more exiting than the other. However, all potentiality is killed by repeating interviews like this: The boss of the person sits down with her own daughter, telling her, there was an incident with a rocket and the person, a friend to the daughter, died. The daughter wonders whether it was necessary that the person was on the rocket and the mother says yes. And then they hug. 60 seconds, embarrassing to watch, boring and pointless. And to really kill every slight expectation that this movie might improve further on, we are now treated with an interview with the mother in which she confesses that it was hard to lie to her daughter. Well, her acting was poor, but not so poor that we missed that, since it was indeed the only point of that conversation and we had been warned in advance about its content several times earlier. Another pointless 20 seconds wasted. That conversation could have been deep, discussing ethical, political, social, economic, environmental or psychological implications both on a personal and a global level. The Beyond, however, has no depth, no story, no characters to care for and I do not understand why it comes to that. Many will disagree when I say there is no story. However, a STORY is not putting events, scenes or images back to back and let them run, but to put them together into a CHAIN that pulls you from start to end. It is extremely expensive to make all this CGI and action stuff, to build models, some of them real life, design, animate and render them. Scenography, makeup, costumes, all the small details. While it costs practically nothing to write a good story and dialog that even a mediocre actor can perform convincingly. There must be thousands of writers who would happily work for free to get a chance to show their talent. Why do so many filmmakers underestimate the importance of a good story and well crafted words or gestures? It would have been much more touching if we had only seen the daughter crying in the arms of the mother/boss for 10-15 seconds. The face of the mother showing guilt and shame for the lie and pain she causes, fighting with the excitement to send the person on to the journey. We would have cared. No words and no triple explanations needed. If that was to much to demand from the actors, shoot it from 10 meters, no faces visible, zooming in on some picture of person and daughter at the beach, fallen on the floor. All this CGI-action-s**t is really boring without the tension of human emotion and conflict. 6 points for the visuals, 3 for the actors, non for the script, gives an average of 3.
The movie The Beyond consists of some nice CGI-imigary alternating with utterly poor and boring interviews with people explaining or commenting on what they/we just saw. Humanity has just experienced two mind-blowing events, a wormhole appearing in Earth's orbit and hundreds of huge, black, indestructible, threatening spheres hovering only a few hundred meters over the ground, spreading fear. A major, though classified, breakthrough in science. A person (I don't remember the name and do indeed not care) has made the ultimate sacrifice to make a dangerous journey from which there might be no return. Altogether potentially fantastic stuff. One thing potentially more exiting than the other. However, all potentiality is killed by repeating interviews like this: The boss of the person sits down with her own daughter, telling her, there was an incident with a rocket and the person, a friend to the daughter, died. The daughter wonders whether it was necessary that the person was on the rocket and the mother says yes. And then they hug. 60 seconds, embarrassing to watch, boring and pointless. And to really kill every slight expectation that this movie might improve further on, we are now treated with an interview with the mother in which she confesses that it was hard to lie to her daughter. Well, her acting was poor, but not so poor that we missed that, since it was indeed the only point of that conversation and we had been warned in advance about its content several times earlier. Another pointless 20 seconds wasted. That conversation could have been deep, discussing ethical, political, social, economic, environmental or psychological implications both on a personal and a global level. The Beyond, however, has no depth, no story, no characters to care for and I do not understand why it comes to that. Many will disagree when I say there is no story. However, a STORY is not putting events, scenes or images back to back and let them run, but to put them together into a CHAIN that pulls you from start to end. It is extremely expensive to make all this CGI and action stuff, to build models, some of them real life, design, animate and render them. Scenography, makeup, costumes, all the small details. While it costs practically nothing to write a good story and dialog that even a mediocre actor can perform convincingly. There must be thousands of writers who would happily work for free to get a chance to show their talent. Why do so many filmmakers underestimate the importance of a good story and well crafted words or gestures? It would have been much more touching if we had only seen the daughter crying in the arms of the mother/boss for 10-15 seconds. The face of the mother showing guilt and shame for the lie and pain she causes, fighting with the excitement to send the person on to the journey. We would have cared. No words and no triple explanations needed. If that was to much to demand from the actors, shoot it from 10 meters, no faces visible, zooming in on some picture of person and daughter at the beach, fallen on the floor. All this CGI-action-s**t is really boring without the tension of human emotion and conflict. 6 points for the visuals, 3 for the actors, non for the script, gives an average of 3.