Room is not as good as everyone says it is.

Rating: 5/10 (29 December 2015)

Room stars Brie Larson and Jacob Tremblay. It offers Larson her best performance of her career and Tremblay a break out role. While he may not quite get past the whole "kid actor" stereotype he is admittedly better than almost every other child actor out there today. Both of these actors are receiving some serious awards buzz right now, as is this film in general. This may be due to the odd nature of its plot line. A mother and child are stuck inside a room for at least five years of their lives. Trapped inside never once going out to see or experience the world. So, when they get out we watch as this child gets to see everything for the first time.
Yes it's an interesting plot that hasn't really been done before but it can't really pull it off. It's odd that it struggles so bad with making this a worthy adaption of the book seeing as the author actually wrote the film. Much like last years 'Gone Girl'. However 'Gone Girl' actually had a good director.
The one other film this director had done was 'Frank'. So I had high hopes for this film. Unfortunately, he may have proved to us that he is a one hit wonder. Because this film is not near as good as everyone is saying. This mainly steams from sloppy writing. Writing that would've probably worked in a book format. In that format you are able to show characters thoughts and feelings far easier than in film so you have to write accordingly.
But this doesn't happen. This is really the only reason this film fails. But it fails hard. From the first scenes of the film it was pretty clear that not enough thought went into making this a piece of cinema. Characters actions and reactions to everything feel absurdly artificial. Like a cop figuring out where the room they lived in was from one extremely vague sentence. Or how the film seems to pretend like these two had never made one single escape attempt.
Literally the second escape they try gets them out. I couldn't help think that they had never actually tried, because the guy didn't even hesitate to buy into their trick. In fact not one person in this film reacts naturally. Everyone was an extreme version of a normal person and it made nearly everyone in the film super unlikable. Especially the main two characters. They did virtually nothing aside from scream at whoever they wanted for no apparent reason.
Almost every conversation ended in an annoying screaming match between random people. A screaming match that either made no sense or just made you dislike the characters. So, when these two get out it's hard to legitimately care about them. You don't know anything about them other then the fact that they liked yelling for no reason.
'Room' may have strong performances and an interesting idea to back it up but not much else. It has a hard time making you actually care about its characters. No one reacts like a human being but instead yells at each other when ever they feel like they need to. It wastes its best qualities with a limp and lifeless script that fails to appropriately adapt the acclaimed novel.