Ok, so before I tell you how this film is a complete and utter failure let me tell you i have only given one other movie ever a 1 star review. it's extremely hard for me to believe a film should be rated 1 star, because most of the time there is at least ONE DECENT thing in a film, but not this, oh no .
Literally every single aspect of this movie is a complete failure, from the cinematography, to the visual effects, to the acting. I'm not joking, I literally can't find a single aspect of this movie I would even call bad. It's all worse then bad, I actually can't comprehend how a film could be made this poorly.
Acting: Okay, no one in this film can act, literally no one. Everyone seems like they're trying to hard especially the main actress whatever her name is, usually bad acting is caused by the actors not having a good script to work with, this indeed has a terrible script but the actors themselves are all terrible as well.
Cinematography: the cinematography in this movie literally makes me want to cry, half the shots are out of focus or over exposed. it's not like they didn't have good equipment, they had fairly spendy cameras they used on this project, but whoever was behind them had no idea what they were doing. the framing is awful, the lighting is awful, if they even had a focus puller they deserved to be fired. I almost forgot, they had good cameras and while watching the film I saw so many shots that looked like they were greenscreen, BUT NO. I watched a behind the scenes special, and most of those shots were actual physical locations, how incompetent can you be to make a real location look so bad a viewer thinks it's a green screen? I actually can't stress how terrible this aspect of the movie was.
Editing: The editing is horrific, not only is the pacing off on almost every single shot, it seems that the editor doesn't know how to edit even the smallest things. They never do anything right, they're cutting at the wrong moments, the dialogue was cut of in some points, someone is literally mid sentence and you changed scenes. There was no consistency with the editing, sometimes there was to many cuts in a scene, and someones they'd makes it all one shot when it made so sense. I really don't understand why they had so many close-ups when they had no need to, I feel like the editing was done in a really short period of time.
Script: I know they said "the script is based on books from the time" and a lot of the dialogue probably was. But the script itself was so so painfully bad, the pacing was all over the place, they used real dialogue from the time period and ruined it. If you want to watch a movie where they utilize a time periods speech style please go watch "the witch. In this film it seems as if a child wrote the script, not only was the pacing bad, but there was no sense of urgency or stress, in what should have been a very scary situation. and there are so many completely useless scenes in this films that make no sense and shouldn't have even made it into the final film. Please if you want to learn how to write a screenplay then watch this film, then do the exact opposite of everything you see, you'll be sure to create something great.
Score/soundtrack: i don't even want to talk about this, everything is so so incredibly awful sounding. I feel I might've given the movie a 2/10 if i watched it without the sound.
Visual effects: Please just stop me now, I actually do visual effects, and I can respect good VFX when it's done right. but this was terrible, the motion tracking was bad, all the green screening was bad, it looked like they literally downloaded a google image and put it into multiple shots. it actually pains me to see VFX work done this poorly.
Color: This is one of the ugliest looking films I've ever watched. The colorist that worked on this movie should watch a few more tutorials before working on another film. The whites are overblown (which a lot of the time is due to the camera work, but still) this film is so dark in some shots you literally can't see, and that wasn't supposed to happen, you were clearly supposed to be able to see whatever was happening. this whole movie looks incredibly flat.
Costume design: Everything looks like it was either bought in a costume shop or made by hand in less then half an hour, I don't even wanna talk about this anymore.
Well I'm just gonna end it at that, I could've gone on for a few hundred more lines but just thinking of this movie makes me furious. So in conclusion, I always try to give a fair rating to films, and even movies that I normally hate don't deserve a 1 star rating. but this is so bad I can't help it, before watching this I never thought a 1 star feature film released in theaters would exist. but oh was I wrong.
And one last note, on the creators website they wrote "Thank you to the academy for including 10 days in a madhouse in the 89th academy awards and to be CONSIDERED FOR AN OSCAR" please STOP LYING ON YOUR WEBSITE, no one in the academy would even consider giving your film a nomination. And please stop putting fake reviews to try and bump your numbers up. Seriously how sad can you be that people think your movie sucked that you create fake reviews? I actually can't understand that. Just take the criticism and and work on making your next film better.
Literally every single aspect of this movie is a complete failure, from the cinematography, to the visual effects, to the acting. I'm not joking, I literally can't find a single aspect of this movie I would even call bad. It's all worse then bad, I actually can't comprehend how a film could be made this poorly.
Acting: Okay, no one in this film can act, literally no one. Everyone seems like they're trying to hard especially the main actress whatever her name is, usually bad acting is caused by the actors not having a good script to work with, this indeed has a terrible script but the actors themselves are all terrible as well.
Cinematography: the cinematography in this movie literally makes me want to cry, half the shots are out of focus or over exposed. it's not like they didn't have good equipment, they had fairly spendy cameras they used on this project, but whoever was behind them had no idea what they were doing. the framing is awful, the lighting is awful, if they even had a focus puller they deserved to be fired. I almost forgot, they had good cameras and while watching the film I saw so many shots that looked like they were greenscreen, BUT NO. I watched a behind the scenes special, and most of those shots were actual physical locations, how incompetent can you be to make a real location look so bad a viewer thinks it's a green screen? I actually can't stress how terrible this aspect of the movie was.
Editing: The editing is horrific, not only is the pacing off on almost every single shot, it seems that the editor doesn't know how to edit even the smallest things. They never do anything right, they're cutting at the wrong moments, the dialogue was cut of in some points, someone is literally mid sentence and you changed scenes. There was no consistency with the editing, sometimes there was to many cuts in a scene, and someones they'd makes it all one shot when it made so sense. I really don't understand why they had so many close-ups when they had no need to, I feel like the editing was done in a really short period of time.
Script: I know they said "the script is based on books from the time" and a lot of the dialogue probably was. But the script itself was so so painfully bad, the pacing was all over the place, they used real dialogue from the time period and ruined it. If you want to watch a movie where they utilize a time periods speech style please go watch "the witch. In this film it seems as if a child wrote the script, not only was the pacing bad, but there was no sense of urgency or stress, in what should have been a very scary situation. and there are so many completely useless scenes in this films that make no sense and shouldn't have even made it into the final film. Please if you want to learn how to write a screenplay then watch this film, then do the exact opposite of everything you see, you'll be sure to create something great.
Score/soundtrack: i don't even want to talk about this, everything is so so incredibly awful sounding. I feel I might've given the movie a 2/10 if i watched it without the sound.
Visual effects: Please just stop me now, I actually do visual effects, and I can respect good VFX when it's done right. but this was terrible, the motion tracking was bad, all the green screening was bad, it looked like they literally downloaded a google image and put it into multiple shots. it actually pains me to see VFX work done this poorly.
Color: This is one of the ugliest looking films I've ever watched. The colorist that worked on this movie should watch a few more tutorials before working on another film. The whites are overblown (which a lot of the time is due to the camera work, but still) this film is so dark in some shots you literally can't see, and that wasn't supposed to happen, you were clearly supposed to be able to see whatever was happening. this whole movie looks incredibly flat.
Costume design: Everything looks like it was either bought in a costume shop or made by hand in less then half an hour, I don't even wanna talk about this anymore.
Well I'm just gonna end it at that, I could've gone on for a few hundred more lines but just thinking of this movie makes me furious. So in conclusion, I always try to give a fair rating to films, and even movies that I normally hate don't deserve a 1 star rating. but this is so bad I can't help it, before watching this I never thought a 1 star feature film released in theaters would exist. but oh was I wrong.
And one last note, on the creators website they wrote "Thank you to the academy for including 10 days in a madhouse in the 89th academy awards and to be CONSIDERED FOR AN OSCAR" please STOP LYING ON YOUR WEBSITE, no one in the academy would even consider giving your film a nomination. And please stop putting fake reviews to try and bump your numbers up. Seriously how sad can you be that people think your movie sucked that you create fake reviews? I actually can't understand that. Just take the criticism and and work on making your next film better.