So this is a Denis Villeneuve movie. I didn’t actually remember that when I watched it, but as the credits came up and it said his name, I was like “OH OF COURSE,” because it is extremely Denis Villeneuve. The aerial panning shots are basically lifted straight out of Dune, the slow, moody music is right out of Arrival, it’s all his stuff right up there onscreen.

So if you want to watch a stylish Denis Villeneuve movie, hey, here you are. That’s all great. But the problem with this movie is the substance. It’s doing that tired old “the bad guys are so bad that we have to be bad ourselves in order to stop them, but oh no that makes me morally conflicted, can’t we just be good” trope in a basically by-the-numbers way, and I don’t think it has anything to offer other than the deliberately ambiguous glorification[1] of torture and violence.

It’s really well made, the acting is great, it’s all excellent, except it’s hollow at its core. Recommended as spectacle, but nothing more.

  1. By which I mean, plenty of people will be like “you’re not supposed to think those things are good! did you even watch the movie! it’s clearly showing that they’re bad, you’re supposed to identify with the protagonist who is made uncomfortable by all this stuff, not the morally compromised people who do it!” Okay cool, but also it’s two hours of stylish violence with multiple scenes of people (including the conflicted protagonist) saying that non-torture/violence approaches aren’t getting the job done. It’s enough of a fig leaf to make people feel okay about the ambiguity, but not enough to change what the movie is. ↩︎