Motion Sickness

Rating: Null/10 (17 August 1999)

I was drawn to The Blair Witch Project by the media hype and by Roger Ebert's praise for the movie. I knew that something was amiss when I saw posted on the door at the entrance to the movie a large printed sign which read, "Warning: To date, fourteen patrons have complained of motion sickness while viewing this film." I computed that the warning had to be a reference to the continual jerkiness of a hand-held camera, the same kind of camera jerkiness that caused me to walk out on the first thirty minutes of the Normandy Invasion in Saving Private Ryan - millions of dollars spent on recreating the invasion, yet not allowing the viewer to fully take in the horror and detail of it all - a cinematic cheat. The Blair Witch Project is well suited to cinema at the university level - avant garde, simple exercise in horror and suspense, use of a hand-held camera to show disorientation, etc. Great for teaching film-making techniques. But to place this 16 millimeter student-like film in general distribution is to rob $8 admission-payers of their hard-earned money. We get from a movie what we bring to it: I live in a forest much like the Maryland forest in the movie and do not find forests creepy; anyone with a scintilla of sense knows to look for moss on the trees to know which way is north; I do not believe in witches; and, I believe that paying audiences should receive a dramatic payoff of some kind after investing 80 minutes in a movie. For these reasons, and others, the Blair Witch Project fell far short of the mark. I, too, had motion sickness after leaving the Project, but not because of the jerky camera - because of my mad dash to the parking lot.