I am impressed.

Rating: 9/10 (27 June 2009)

I was originally going to give this a slightly lower score, but it really is a very good movie. But let's be serious; as a book-to-movie adaptation this pretty much fails, as it takes an entirely different view of the story as compared to Stephen King's original novel. For the first half hour or forty five minutes of this movie, you will be questioning why certain things were not added, why certain things were changed and why everything else, but by the end you'll be hooked because this movie knows how to pull the scares with efficiency and great measure.
The problems are as follows: there is barely any tension in the beginning of the film, no descent into madness or inner conflict with the Jack character. Where was that? This movie just skipped all of that and sort of jumped right into things, and while I enjoyed it, it could have been done better than it was. It didn't make any sense the way it was here, and the character development was pretty much a zero for every character. The first half of this film just sort of speeds by without really setting much up – don't get me wrong, this is great for what it is, but it would have been a real masterpiece if we had been given a slightly altered beginning that showed us more of Jack's "normal" side, given us a reason to doubt his spiral into madness later on. And I don't think this movie really elaborated on the whole "shining" concept much, which is silly considering the name of the movie, but whatever.
We really do have to work with what we're given, and honestly, this really is a horror classic when you get down to bare bones. I mean, once things really kick off at about the hour and a half mark, the movie takes no prisoners. And by the two hour mark, it doesn't matter whether or not you want to see stuff from the book on the screen, because Stanley f*cking Kubrick is SCARING THE HELL OUT OF YOU. Seriously, the last half hour of this movie rules, everything about it does.
Another great thing about this movie? Jack Nicholson. At first I thought he didn't fit the part of Jack Torrance, but really that was just because of the inconsistent pacing I mentioned above. No. Jack Nicholson's tremendous screen presence is one of the best things about this. He's just so entertaining to watch, even when he over-emotes things a bit. He does a really great job, even just playing "himself."
One thing this whole movie does really well is suspense and tension, with ruthless camera angles creating a horrific portrait that you will not forget. This movie might be lacking as an adaptation, but that's the thing I've been learning lately with these things: you can't have a great movie that is also a book adaptation, because they're just two different mediums that require different things in order to be good. Yeah, Kubrick changed a lot here, but what came out in the end was really a very successful and well made horror movie that succeeds at what it is trying to do. The Shining is a blood-soaked horror classic that you won't want to miss if you haven't seen it already.