Things I think:

  1. It’s a pretty good movie.
  2. But I was CORRECT not to listen to its biggest fans, because it was NOT the greatest movie of all time ever or anything like that. It was fun, it was good, but it was nothing to be all omg over.

Spoilery things I also think:

Spoilers

  1. So, part of what surprised me aboot the movie is that it wasn’t that surprising. Everyone kept talking aboot all the big plot twists, but… there weren’t many! From minute zero, you knew that this was a non-organic horror situation — I mean, the “monitor” characters are introduced before the subject characters, right? And the last possible minute you could be unclear on what the monitors were doing was when the first subject dies, and Josh kisses his amulet and offers up a prayer of sacrifice to the Old Ones. But I feel like some reviewers thought there were big reveals near the end?

  2. Which is not a criticism of the movie. I thought that it paced out its revelations very well, and that trying to keep those things omg secret until the end would have just backfired into eye-rolling. The way it did it was great.

  3. I 100% agree with Alyssa Rosenberg that the “whore” character was dealt with poorly, utterly failing to be subversive or anything, and with a thoroughly one-note performance.

  4. So some have said that the characterizations in general went beyond stereo/arche-type, but yeah, no. Making a glancing reference to someone’s major is not the same thing as giving a character actual observable depth.

  5. I wouldn’t have thought that the film version of “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” would be a slasher film, but there you are.