Okay. I looked at the cover of this movie and saw that it got recognition at the Cannes Film Festival. I thought to myself, "Well, this should be intriguing. Surely films don't win awards if they're not at least somewhat good." And I was very wrong. That'll teach me.
I understand that, basically, we are treated to a very normal day in high school, only to be disturbed as to how it could take such a horrible turn. That said, let us begin my nitpicking.
First off, perhaps other schools are like this, but in my high school (which I attended 1999 to 2003, so I'm not relating to out-of-date experience here), kids were supposed to go to class. Kids were admonished and interrogated if they were seen wandering the halls. Kids were not allowed to sign themselves out of school without some sort of official note and it had to be done 24 hours in advance. But, again, this was just my school, so I suppose at a larger school, these would be different.
BUT the larger size of this school sure produces a plethora of amazingly intriguing characters. You want a REAL high school? There are plenty of real people in high school that don't have eating disorders, aren't insecure pariahs, aren't so into the beauty of life they take a picture when it's obvious they're in danger, and actually panic when the school is being attacked. The only average people in the movie were the boyfriend and girlfriend, who actually seemed to be afraid. Average is majority, so if the filmmaker wanted to subdue us with the normal pace of life and then disturb us, he could have shown us more average people, who might have actually had real conversations with other people, like people usually do. Average people would've actually scrambled out the windows too, or shown horrified emotion when speaking to their father about what was happening at the school.
Now we come to the pacing, one of the more debated factors of this movie. I suppose this was to give us the view of how the characters were just leading their everyday lives, the ho-hum of yesterday and tomorrow, but.. Come on, people. Frankly, I was so bored of people walking down halls and having brief conversations that I wasn't shocked at the ending; I was grateful that something was happening. Granted, I was still disturbed and wondered what would bring people to commit such atrocities on innocent people, but a filmmaker still could have garnered that reaction from me with a little less real-time school expeditions.
This is not to say I saw no value in this movie. I know that perhaps we weren't treated to character development because we are not privy to personal relationships with real life victims of school shootings, so it would be unrealistic to have us relate the emotions drawn from this movie to the attacks we hear about in real life. Also, while watching it, my friend pointed out that the point of view we get is akin to that of a video game, such as the shoot-em-up one of the shooters is playing on a computer at one point in the film. This can also explain Alex's last action towards Eric; he was just getting rid of a competitor.
And, to bring up a more feminist point of view, I did not like how the female characters were either awkward weirdos, irritating bitches with eating disorders, or a possible teen mom. At least Eli was kinda cool and John was nice guy just trying to deal. I couldn't relate to any of the female characters. And to go further, if you all are looking for a *real* representation of high school life, you'd need average people who aren't aesthetically perfect.
This had a lot of potential, and did have some interesting parts, but all in all, it is a poor film.
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