Director: Kelly Reichardt
Rating: R
Running Time: 1 hour, 52 minutes
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A trio of environmental activists, in an effort to do their part in changing the world, plan and execute the bombing of a dam and deal with the subsequent fallout and paranoia of their actions.
Okay, we get it. We love Earth just as much as the next people on this planet. Maybe we don't always do our 100% part, but we have done little things to facilitate "going green." Hey, we recycle, man! It's tough, I'm not gonna lie, because sometimes it feels like our efforts don't matter when we see that our neighbors don't recycle, but we'd never think to go blow up their trash cans in protest of their actions.
Acts of eco-terrorism are just that: terrorism. Just because the people in this movie are trying to help the Earth doesn't negate their immoral actions. At the end of the day, it's all the same terrorism regardless of the ideology behind it.
It's not even the fact that the characters don't understand the severity of their actions, or that they seem completely ignorant to what they are trying to do that makes this movie suck. Its that we don't give a shit about any of the people involved in this movie or even their plight and advocacy for environmentalism. The characters are so underdeveloped that if they were real people in the real world trying to get us involved in the movement to "go green" or to "be water-wise," they would actually make us care less about the Earth. The movie is so poorly paced it's like a tortoise drudging through the mud. Any redeeming value the movie could have had by showing the dam in its final moments of destruction was lost as there was not enough money in budget to even spare a tiny little explosion.
Plus, people in the nearby areas wouldn't just naturally think to check local stores to see is any large amounts of fertilizer were purchased within the recent days after a bombing? I know they used fake IDs, but come the hell on! Facial recognition software would have her WANTED posters all over the damn place in a matter of hours...
Jesse Eisenberg is the actorial equivalent of watching paint dry. He is so boring, so uninteresting, and so twitchy that it's hard to get into any movie where he's the star. Dakota Fanning is one actress that filmmakers seem to "dress down" really well (unlike Chloe Grace Moretz), so we guess we'll give her that? She seems to be obsessed with doing arthouse type movies where she is praying that someone will recognize her for an award somewhere....anywhere. This is the kind of movie critics wait all year for. In our opinion, a filmmaker's main goal should be to entertain and enthrall audiences, not to solely please critics, and in that aspect, this movie fails. We understand the importance of the climate change debate and what it could potentially do if we are "too late," but nothing in this movie makes us sympathize with the issues at hand. It's a really boring and underdeveloped attempt at a character sketch with a bigger message that ultimately failed at connecting with audiences. I mean, this movie was so bad, the guy behind us fell asleep and snored...really really loudly.
My Rating: 4/10
BigJ's Rating: 4/10
IMDB's Rating: 6.6/10
Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 83%
Do we recommend this movie: No.
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