Benjamin Button reminds us all that Time is Precious

Rating: 3/10 (25 July 2010)

Perhaps the most overwhelming emotion I experienced during and after this film was that we have only so much time in which to enjoy life. Unfortunately this reminder of our mortality had nothing to do with having watched a deep, insightful, thought-provoking film, but instead was because I had just sat through over 2 and a half hours of really very dull movie.
I have nothing against slow films. I am not an action film junkie in any way and would rather enjoy a thoughtful experience at the cinema than some car-chase thriller with a generic plot/characters/dialogue/soundtrack. But The Curious Case of Benjamin Button was a big disappointment. In fact the only curious thing about it was that it ever made it into my local picturehouse cinema.
It did not strike me as a particularly original or clever concept, not that a film necessarily has to be either, but in this case at least a dose of one or the other would have made the experience more bearable. As it was I spent a good deal of the second half looking at my watch... which seemed to be going backwards. Unfortunately unlike Benjamin instead of feeling younger at the end I felt a good deal older than when I had taken my seat.
So I am writing this a long time after having watched it, but having seen that somehow it rated 8/10 on IMDb I felt duty bound to add my voice of discontent!