A very bland and overrated film

Rating: 5/10 (10 February 2020)

At this point - and I beg you, if you are not going to read all of my arguments, don't just downvote this so that others won't see it - Parasite has become highly overrated. It has got a lot of stuff going for it in a masterclass manner such as the editing and beautiful production design (as well as just people's curiousity, it being an acclaimed foreign film suddenly sky-rocketing in attention worldwilde). But overall the story is bland. It is extremely unrealistic, especially! at the end.
Like, I suspended disbelief with a lot of stuff in this movie to enjoy it, and it's fine, we all do that sometimes. When that certain character was still alive at the end, being able to go out unnoticed by police or really anyone, and understand and perfectly read a huge monologue made by morse codes from a lamp. The amount of just-the-right timing and ignoring common sense in terms of movie logic and even character logic... It's insane. You can suspend disbelief and have a good time, but that is beyond ridiculous. And to be frank, it was unneccesary.
The point the movie wanted to come across was already made at the climax, so giving us two long final monologues arguing them again was more than not needed.
It's also shallow with its message, and missing the point of having something specific to say. At the end, the message becomes something like "plans are not good, you'll fail if you're from a low social class either way". Yet in the beginning, their clear laziness yet cunning way of corrupting the rich family is what got them into this mess. Not that lacking a plan and staying the same (feeding off of others) would've made it better. It's really just that the plan they did make was unbelievably insane and not very long-term sustainable. So, what is the point and message again, and how does it count here? I'm sure you can spend hours yourself coming up with some different things which are taken out of this scene and this scene and make sense, but the movie is just too unclear and too unspecific to really get it across overall as a story. Especially! since the situation these people make up (and weren't even forced into) is not really related to how low class people actually deal with stuff such as their place in opposition to the higher class. There's been cases of this, but it just doesn't fit with the point and have any moral or commonsense value. It seems more than anything than an attempt to make us feel pity for people who were low and somehow got themselves even lower. (Which, making us feel pity succeeds, but please, pity is one weak goal for a story when you leave behind the actual fight to get past it. Then what is the journey? For one, I don't like the Joker comparisons, but in this case the main character in that movie tried to get out of the pity before he became corrupt, hence making a point of the hopelessness; no matter how he did the right thing, he would've ended up like that. This?...)
It felt like Suicide Squad writing in the way of moving from one point to another, an explosion here and a twist there, enough to keep you from figuring the whole movie out, but when one sequence is introduced (peach sequence) you quickly figure out that the end of that is going to be the whole family taking over, and these sequences keep happening over the course of the entire movie: *Surprise* *oh so this is what's happening* *Surprise* *oh so this is what's happening*. And it doesn't make for much organic, fluent storytelling overall, or delivers a message along with it, although the smooth and undeniably masterful editing and rhytm will try and convince you of that.
The symbolism is also very in-your face and sometimes outright stupid. The whole going up and down stairs thing to demonstrate class system etc. is cool enough especially watching it as a brilliantly mood-grabbing visual, although obvious (and seriously unavoidable considering it's just how you go down into a basement, and rich people houses usually just live on the higher grounds). Throwing in a rock and leaving the audience to come up with something to say about it is, to me, disrespectful. I've looked up so many interviews with the cast and Bong himself, but they don't seem to know or care about explaining it themselves, they never dig into the actual symbolism, they just go "here, this is symbolism, it's great right?" and go to the next thing they love but appear humble about in their movie. A lot of saying that there is symbolism and meaning in everything, yet being very hollow about it, or it's something that is obvious and you'd do in most movies to get a point across. Then I looked up audience interpretations of everything from the rock to the weather and dialogue, and there's nothing mindblowing nor very impressive about it. Especially that rock and what they do with it in the movie, it's just...wow, thanks, makes sense.
A lot of people are praising this movie so highly, yet it's a very decent film without anything too much to say, and an unbelievablity factor that's offensive at last. I don't know why people praise it so highly. If it's just the momentum it's been building up. Rated #22 movie of all time over Silence of the Lambs, The Green Mile, The Usual Suspects and a dozen of other classics which put so much more obvious work into their scripts and therefore the solids of their movies? Winning Best Picture *and* Best Director over 1917, a cinematic war piece you'll simply never see at the same level again, and Joker, a movie that was actually clear with its message - that there is a certain hopelessness in class systems no matter how hard you try? It literally makes no sense except for the momentum and everybody downvoting and ignoring anyone who has got anything negative to say about it. Scary stuff.
Parasite worked on multiple levels, but to me, the writing simply tore much of that apart. It's very sad that other masterpieces were almost completely or completely ignored at the Oscars, while something like this gets away with not only the biggest prize of them all but also several other big ones (Best Director and even Original Screenplay), when there are major issues in all of those departments.
That said, the Oscars are known for doing what it takes to stay relevant and out of too much danger, as well as voting with sometimes anything but commonsense. I hope that in time people will calm down, step down from their high horses and actually take in some of this. And I really hope that some of the other movies which didn't get the same amount of attention and praise at the Oscars, will live on greatly.
A sad disappointment. Thank you sincerely if you've read this much. I appreciate it whether or not we've come to the same conclusions.