'Silence' could use a good dose of it's title

Rating: 2/10 (3 January 2017)

'Silence' could use a good dose of it's title. Scorsese smothers his film with unnecessary, repetitive narration. Powerful imagery, what little there is, is obscured by a narrator constantly telling you what just happened, often over and over again. There's no better example of this than the very start of the film. In a gruesome example of the Japanese assault on Christian theology, a group of Catholic priests are tortured and killed. What should be a powerful scene setting the stage for the rest of the film is blunted by a torrent of emotionally disconnected narration out of sync with the events on screen. Not since Blade Runner has narration marred a film so thoroughly. Scorsese has talked about struggling with how to realize the film's big moment at the end. Turning it into a needle in a haystack is not the answer he was looking for. This film needs a top to bottom reedit with a good sound team.