Imagine a movie starring… Julia Roberts Mahershala Ali, Ethan Hawke, 3 high-caliber actors, along with a great director, producer, and writer like Sam Ismail, and a novel that received a very good critical and audience reception in the year 2020. Even, you certainly expected to see an integrated dramatic meal, but the result was completely disappointing.
The film produced by Netflix lacked several elements that make it attractive despite the different idea, the end of the world and characters whose internal conflict (racism / struggle over property / identity crisis) overlapped with what is really happening in the world, so they were preoccupied with the conflicts and did not know that the world was ending around them.
Perhaps the most notable flaw of the film is the direction:
The directing was very showy, with complex and incomprehensible shooting angles, and with the escalating scenes, the director insists on turning the camera in a strange, incomprehensible way, with no understanding of its purpose, overlapping between the scenes twice in parallel dramatic escalations in several places, anticipation of the events, and then nothing at the end.
Another thing is that the pace of the film was very slow. The rhythm was not slow so that you could think about the events and messages that the film wanted to convey, but it was slow and boring. Perhaps this is because the film does not move. The world of the film stopped within its internal frame at a specific point, and even in the moments when it tries In which the film builds interesting and tense interwoven scenes that end suddenly without the climax as it began.
Music… from the beginning, the reliance on tense music, even in very ordinary scenes, as if the film makers wanted to emphasize that this is a film about the end of the world. Very tense music in a scene on the beach or for two children having fun in a swimming pool. The music is present without a consequence of its presence, it is in the background. The scene is a stressful factor for the scenes, but it is not significant in the scene.
Acting… You feel that the heroes of the work themselves were not in their ideal state. Julia Roberts is in an average performance at best. Even in her detailed scenes, her emotions are not as much as the scene. Either she is much more emotional than the scene can bear, so the matter becomes closer to comedy, as in the deer scene, or Less than what the scene tolerates, and you find her without appropriate expressions.
Maharshala Ali is also in a very average but coherent performance and much better than Julia Roberts. Perhaps the best scenes in the film were the scenes that bring them together. The best performances came from both of them during the events of the film.
My Mashhad Leave the World Behind
The best performance ever in the film is that of Ethan Hawke, a complete case of the performance of the traditional American father, a peaceful person who finds himself in difficult situations that he has never been exposed to before with the loss of all means of communication. He must depend on himself and on others. There are no communications, no networks, and no satellites. Industrial, his performance escalates throughout the film until we reach the end scenes and the explosion of his simple, unassuming performance.
The scenario… The film’s scenario is the biggest disaster. If 30% of the film’s problems are caused by the direction, then certainly 60% of its problems are caused by the scenario, which was written by the director Sam Ismail with the novel’s writer Roman Allam. It collected many defects, but the most important of all is the film’s severe state of sluggishness and the most important. It is a state of laziness in delivering messages.
The scenario, which criticizes several things in American culture and politics and criticizes the complete reliance on technology in all aspects of life, tries to emphasize these messages suddenly and without introduction, with speeches by its heroes in which they say the wisdom of the film and its conclusion: We have relied on technology too much. America has formed a lot of hostilities with… There are many people who want to harm them. Families are broken up and want to reunite. Even the sayings that were written on the backs of notebooks in the 1990s, such as “Union is strength,” are said by the film’s heroes to each other. The film is not content with pointing out, but it insists on conveying its messages in the simplest and laziest ways possible. Hollow rhetoric.
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The movie Leave the World Behind, which lasted for two and a third hours, might have been better for it to have been only an hour and a half. Perhaps then it would have been much improved. Instead of stretching the directorial muscles with meaningless plots and compositions, perhaps if the directing had been traditionally simple, it would have been better. The film’s excuse is that it discusses philosophical ideas. It is critical of the life we live now and contains rich ideas, great potential for success, and powerful actors. It lost almost all of its bets, and only the good story remained that was told in the worst possible way.
My rating for Leave the World Behind is 4 out of 10.
