a classic wannabe, an intellectual flop

Rating: 4/10 (22 March 2003)

I went to see this movie after hearing all the noise it did, after hearing some of my friends say it was the best picture ever... and I was truly disapointed.
First of all, its photography. Of course, it is great in technical point of view, the shot of the eye dilating is cool, all the visual effects are cool, and technically astonishing. But, it is just that, it is just cool. They do not mean anything, they are put there just to decorate the story, they are useless. And there is too many of them. I went to see a movie, not a parade of technical skills. A movie, not a video clip. What could have been an interesting aspect of the movie becomes boring and excessive.
It is the same thing with the story, which I find extremely moralistic. Of course, drugs are bad, of course they can kill you, I don't need to pay ten dollars and suffer during two hours to understand it. My parents told me that many times before. Besides, the way Aronofsky uses to affect his audience is easy, sadly easy. He wants to shock you, and in the hardest way. And he goes for the easy way. It is easy to make you cry and to make you hate a character showing him kick a dog to death. In the same way, he shows you a rotting arm, gore sex and all the disgraces that can happen to a poor junkie or to his mother addicted to pills and TV. He never tries to say things in a subtle way, he things people who see his movie are idiots who can not understand anything unless he shows it, completely. He made a movie for idiots, I must repeat it.
He does too much and is redundant in his message and in the way he tells it. I could elaborate, give more arguments and examples, but this movie really do not deserve more of my time. I have wasted enough seeing it. If "Requiem for a Dream" is worth something, it is just because of the images effects, because its subject, drugs, is the same a teenager would choose and what he says about it is not much more mature. Drugs are not so interesting and this movie does not tell me anything I did not know before about them. And what irritates me the most is to see that there still are people who have the courage to say this is a classic! Well, I just hope that, with the years, it will be forgotten...