What a shame

Rating: 1/10 (19 September 1999)

The Truman Show could have been so good. There were good intentions behind it and clearly some people with huge ability working on it. The problem was that though it pretended it was treating the audience as an intelligent entity it took the typical Hollywood attitude of presuming that after all that we would not think about this film.
The subject matter demands that as we leave the cinema we must think about the questions that have been asked of us. To what extent is the media dominating or commanding our lives, do we live to see other's manipulated, is what around us real or a projection of our imaginations (however sick and warped that may be). All very well, in fact excellent. Too few films ask us to question the world around us. But this is where we run into problems. You see, once you start thinking about the film you realise quite how many holes there are in the plot.
Forgive me but I would presume that if a man is brought up in a fake world he would never know it was fake because it wasn't fake to him. For Truman Burbank there can be no real world because in reality to him everything outside the TV studio which is his reality is fake. Forgive me if I'm not explaining myself clearly enough. Let me put it like this. If all your life the rain simply followed you about and did not touch others would you question it. The answer is no because that is the way things are for you.
For Truman to one day start thinking this is a bit weird is not only unlikely and out of character, it could never happen. Similarly he would not only not find it odd that people around were constantly advertising products, he would adopt that speech pattern himself. Ultimately this would lead to the failure of the show itself because Truman would no longer be a real man to the viewers, instead he would be more like a trained monkey performing tricks. But this is straying from the point (though it does demonstrate how examination of the film proves how badly thought through it is).
Now onto a second complaint, why is it that the people around Truman have no feelings for him? They have grown up with him, gone through life with him. Yes, I accept he is their life line but I find it hard to believe that a man who has played his best friend for the best part of 30 years cannot care for him in the slightest. Not even his 'parents' seem to have any real interest in his wellbeing, despite the fact that they have brought him up as if he were their own. Are the makers of this film so cynical that they cannot give even the smallest amount of humanity to these characters?
I have several other problems with the film, particularly the ending which was one of the most utterly contrived moments on film I have ever seen, as well as the lack of scope given to the show's creator, Christof (easily the best thing in it) and the unnecessary 'love interest.' However, the major flaw of this film was the idea behind it. It was so good that I don't think anyone really stopped to think out the complexities before making it.
It is such a shame because what could have been so good turned out to be so bad.