Shinning lights

Rating: 7/10 (5 March 2016)

What most journalistic movies have in common is a large number of characters and a lengthy chain of events which make the story really difficult to follow. And since the drama is mostly formed by dialogues, a boring movie is what audience expect from this genre. Take for instance a movie like Zodiac (2007) . It's all good and everything but at times I felt I needed a pen and a paper to make some notes of who is who in the movie. Luckily the writers of Spotlight have done a good job in this case.
It too has a lot of characters but we see most of them more than once and they are mostly introduced well so the audience will have a little problem with identifying the characters. Moreover, the story line is also fairly easy to follow; side stories are not too many and they contribute to the body of the drama. There are also smooth references to its own scenes detecting which can be really enjoyable for the audience. ' Rotten apple' is a good example of this. Or when we see Patrick playing with his kid in a playground.
The movie ends when the whole thing starts. All the work the characters were doing bears fruit and the moment the struggle is going the start, screen turns black and a list of cities in which the same phenomenon was observed appears. And it's an exhaustive list; as shocking as the long list of priests in the movie. I guess the makers of Spotlight hoped they started some sort of movement. When audience is sitting there with a light shining on a very sensitive issue and then they are given the torch to look around in darkness for themselves and gain the kind of awareness they had turned a blind eye on for years.
There is also a documentary called Deliver us from evil (2006) on the same topic which takes the audience to a new level of shock and devastation. See a priest confessing to molesting children nonchalantly and gives you an absolute chill. Having seen that and then this one I thought a documentary would have been a better medium to put the message of the movie across. In other words why dramatizing the whole thing when the reality is more dreadful than a feature film.