10/20: Eli
10/20: Heading back to the Netflix Originals for today's movie, this one fresh off the presses: Eli. Uh... k. Where to start with this movie... well, perhaps it's easiest to start this review off how Eli starts off: where things make sense. At the start, Eli is about a bubble boy. Yep, like a horror version of the Seinfeld episode.
"He lives in a bubble!" "Boy..."
Eli, said bubble boy, is taken by his parents to see a specialist who says she can cure his ailment; so far, according to her, she has a 100% success rate. Eli begins the radical treatments but begins to become suspicious that the doctor is making him sicker. Couple that with the strange behavior of his parents (namely his father, who is Creep Town USA), the mysterious appearance of a girl his age who tells him terrible stories, and ghosts that seem intent to expose him to the truth behind the house and Eli's suspicions grow to a fever pitch.
Yeah, and then the movie takes a left turn so hard that I practically got whiplash.
"MOOPS!" Weirdly, this gif pretty accurately sums up Eli's twist. So it IS just a remake the Seinfeld episode!
I still don't really know how I feel about it, honestly. Eli is set up as a haunting story, or at least some sort of conspiracy, but becomes some radical other thing entirely by the close. I won't give anything away, but suffice to say it's bonkers. While I'm all for twists, especially bizarre ones, I'm left feeling that this one wasn't earned. In order to successfully sell a twist, especially one this crazy, the bread crumb trail has to exist to get you there. I look at a movie like The Sixth Sense that had a twist that blew people's minds when they first saw it. Going back and watching it again, you can see the machinations leading to the twist. The crazy twist is earned by doing the work to get there. I don't know if Eli does that. It is one kind of movie, with the occasional hint sprinkled here and there, and becomes a completely other movie in a single moment. It's cool on one level, but when it's unearned? It makes Eli into a movie that, despite cool ideas, feels lacking.
7/10
Eli, said bubble boy, is taken by his parents to see a specialist who says she can cure his ailment; so far, according to her, she has a 100% success rate. Eli begins the radical treatments but begins to become suspicious that the doctor is making him sicker. Couple that with the strange behavior of his parents (namely his father, who is Creep Town USA), the mysterious appearance of a girl his age who tells him terrible stories, and ghosts that seem intent to expose him to the truth behind the house and Eli's suspicions grow to a fever pitch.
Yeah, and then the movie takes a left turn so hard that I practically got whiplash.
I still don't really know how I feel about it, honestly. Eli is set up as a haunting story, or at least some sort of conspiracy, but becomes some radical other thing entirely by the close. I won't give anything away, but suffice to say it's bonkers. While I'm all for twists, especially bizarre ones, I'm left feeling that this one wasn't earned. In order to successfully sell a twist, especially one this crazy, the bread crumb trail has to exist to get you there. I look at a movie like The Sixth Sense that had a twist that blew people's minds when they first saw it. Going back and watching it again, you can see the machinations leading to the twist. The crazy twist is earned by doing the work to get there. I don't know if Eli does that. It is one kind of movie, with the occasional hint sprinkled here and there, and becomes a completely other movie in a single moment. It's cool on one level, but when it's unearned? It makes Eli into a movie that, despite cool ideas, feels lacking.
7/10
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