shining

Rating: 10/10 (27 August 2001)

To say that the film is a masterpiece means almost nothing, especially in today's deteriorated understanding of what masterpiece is. The film is a pinnacle of the world cinematography. It has everything that the real masterpiece has to have: superb direction and screenplay, casting, music, plot, and a theme that deals with timeless concept. What brings the film to the highest points is its power, by which the supreme humanistic ideals as freedom and democracy are, together with everyday-life-related human foibles, are kindly presented for our consideration.
The film makes us focus on valuable humanistic categories, without which a man is not a man, meanwhile admitting that no one's perfect, that less-important shortcomings of a man may be acceptable in our not idealized life.
The film has advantages compared with the original story, which is brilliant itself. Eliminating the Chief's narrative style, the film becomes more objective and realistic for perception: you get in a first-line contact with McMurphy and others. Nurse Ratched is nice-looking rather than almost a monster, as described so in the book. Moreover so, the film shows that Nurse Ratched honestly and altruistically serves the patients' life and health, although, as in the story, forgetting about freedom. Therefore, by widening the scope of Ratched's character and making it more common, the McMurphy-Ratched conflict becomes more powerful and substantiated.
There are a few scenes in the film, especially the final one, which I think are among the best scenes in a movie history.
It is a real art: elevated, transparent, at the same time loaded with ideas, and triggering thoughts, an ability of which is as important for the mankind as the principles of democracy and freedom.