A masterpiece of satire

Rating: 4/10 (16 February 2009)

I was very eager to see this film - based on a story by a great pillar of American literature, directed by the ingenious director of 'Fight Club' and 'Se7en', multi-million dollar state-of- the-art special effects, Brad Pitt as a teenager... To say I was disappointed would be an understatement. The film lacked any originality and screenwriter Eric Roth clearly couldn't be bothered to think of any new ideas, so just copied and pasted the screenplay for his previous Oscar-winner (Forrest Gump), changed some names, used a thesaurus, and 'hey presto, nobody's going to notice I've just written the same film I wrote fifteen years ago!'. But indeed, we have noticed. Just check the FAQ to see the innumerable similarities. The times I heard lines to the effect of 'Life is like a box of chocolates' left me fighting the urge to shout 'Run, Forrest, Run... away from this remarkably crap film!' But to be fair, 'Forrest Gump' is a lovely film with (surprisingly) a lot to say for it, so seeing a re-hashed version of it wouldn't be so bad? Well, not when the new version is a whole lot worse. The dialogue is boring, dreary and pointless throughout the whole film, with one in three lines being an aphorism regarding human lives such as 'With life, you've just got to take things as they come' or 'People die and people are born and that's just the way things are.' Yes, Benjamin, we all know this and just because you say it in a deep, rasping Southern accent doesn't make it philosophically insightful. Of course another massive flaw in the screenplay is that it completely ignores the potential of the premise of the film - a man who ages backwards. There is some ACTUAL thought one could put in about that idea, perhaps regarding the temporal nature of life?, the waste of youth on the young? No, no, no... Forrest Gump doesn't need to think of things like that. Ignoring the silliness of the premise, for which there is no attempt to reduce such ridiculousness by making the whole world more fantastical and magical, or finding some kind of scientific explanation for it, he lives his life as any other man, so we must ask, 'What's the point of this movie?' I think I may have realised. There is one way this film can be considered a masterpiece... as a satire. This film is full of every possible Hollywood stereotype of sentimentalism and cheese and the characters have as much depth and emotional intrigue as a penny, yet from a director of a film that said 'They make you believe through the movies that you're gonna be millionaires or rock stars but you're slowly realising that you're not. And you're very angry about that' (or something to that effect), that I think 'either Fincher has had an aneurysm and ingested vast quantities of sugar or this must be intentional'. I've realised that every individual section was in fact a parody of one of the generic Hollywood movies (most of them ending in either a sunset or a sunrise). There were so many moments in film I felt a sense of deja-v, thinking 'I know I've seen this image somewhere before in another movie... or maybe a postcard'. I shan't spoil it, but towards the end there is unnecessary 'pain and heartache' (and I mean really unnecessary - ' He didn't have to leave! He would have had twenty years!'- I nearly shouted) to make sure the audience got in enough of a cry. I have a theory that what Fincher was doing with all of this is making a subtle comment on the emptiness of the Hollywood cliché and how we should look beyond this to find the true soul of our characters beneath the cardboard. But of course, nobody has noticed this so it is really nothing more than pointless clichéd schmaltz. There is real credit to the film in its technical wizardry. The ageing (and rejuvenating) of characters is done with admirable precision and finesse. Physically, the film is quite an achievement. So it is probably there that it earns the majority of its four out of ten stars. A quick note on the acting - perfectly capable given what was provided. Nothing more or less. Overall, I'm very disappointed as this film really could have been something so much more than what it was.