Not a fan

Rating: 5/10 (30 January 2020)

I decided to give The Shining a go after not particularly enjoying Kubrick's other works, A Clockwork Orange and 2001: A Space Odyssey, hoping this one would finally resonate with me.
Unfortunately it did not, but now I know what I don't like most about these movies: it's the terrible pacing. Despite having all the time in the world, Kubrick is simply incapable of escalating the tension gradually. I felt the same thing during A Space Odyssey where nothing happened for hours and then the computer went crazy in a span of 5 minutes. Here, Jack Torrance who is obviously supposed to go crazy gradually during their stay seems to be mad right from the start, so the director basically skips the interesting part. This also means that he can't really take the character any further and even Jack Nicholson's cartoonish overacting gets boring after a while, and you're just waiting for the never-ending chase scene to be over so you can move on to other things.
Another thing that struck me is the soundtrack, which is more like sound torture here. Soundtracks are supposed to blend in and compliment the visuals, but in The Shining sound lives its own life, it's overused and overpowering everything, making the movie very annoying to listen to. I get that it's probably intentional, probably another Kubrick thing, but there were very few movies where instead of being immersed I started thinking about how bad the soundtrack was, and this was one of them.
The visuals are fantastic though, there are some really iconic scenes and images in The Shining, this is basically the only thing that kept me watching until the end.