I tok the wrong bus home and ended up at the mall. The mall had an AMC. But what was playing? I've never been interested in Final Destination movie. Maybe I was too scared when I was 6 - there is an eye doctor scene etched into my memory. This movie was Sci-Fi, it could work. I was slightly worried by the PG-13 rating. Normally movies with that rating are much more formulaic than an R-rated film. As the movie began I was even more worried. I've never in my life seen any other movie recover from such a terrible opening. I need to say that it DID recover, but the acting was so stunted at the start and the dialogue so over the top, dramatic, and expository, that I felt like a found an actual diamond of a terrible movie. I was grinning ear-to-ear from the number of cliches in less than 10 minutes.
I think it's the fact that movie takes place in Sweden, and all the actors have Swedish accent, but the entire movie was in English. What an odd premise. I guess everyone in Sweden speaks English, and they wanted this film to hit the international market. For like 5-10 minutes all I could think about was Wintergatan I will say I did eventually get over this. Similar to how in Sinners I eventually got used to seeing two copies of Michael B. Jordan. After 10 minutes of the movie they really were just two different people. And similarly with Watch the Skies, eventually everyone in Sweden just spoke English. Eventually the expositions dumps were over. Eventually I was situated and it seemed like the movie understood both what it was and how it presented itself, and played off those expectations. It worked.
There is no hole that you can fall down that you can't come back from. This movie's opener plunged it down the abyss, and I would still wholeheartedly recommend it. Several of the characters make decisions that are nigh-irredeemable. Half the cast is self-destructive. Initially there is this overbearing theme of stasis, and depression, and failure, and loneliness. God, I hope people in Sweden are okay. Everyone in the film was so realistically defeated for a little bit that I didn't even register it. They were defeated beyond their characters motivations. They had given up not only about the plot but about a lot of other things.
I would even say this is a drama more than a Sci-Fi. Yes there are Sci-Fi elements, but that's just the setting. I guess all films are dramas. All stories are dramas. This story is EXTREMELY dramatic. It also has so much fun with the time period. It's a love letter to the 70s and 80s. It's also heavily inspired by Interstellar. Not a bad movie to be inspired by. It's a beautiful movie. The cinematography is great. The characters are distinct and fleshed out as much as they need to be. The pacing is snappy. The score is tasteful. The plot is just windy enough.I left the theater feeling genuine raw happiness.
This movie is actually a dub. In fact, it's a 2022 Swedish-language film. The stilted performances at the start made me think it was a dub, but I dismissed the idea because the mouth movements matched perfectly. The secret is that the original Swedish cast re-recorded the entire movie in English, and the lipsync was corrected during editing using a new tool called TrueSync, provided by British startup Flawless. The tech is bleeding edge - I'd compare it to the dawn of CGI. Just like how Jurassic Park was deliberate in their scene staging and shot selection so that the CGI was as invisible as possible, Watch the Skies uses the and is very careful in their translation and performances, so that the emotional impact is retained in the dub, and then TrueSync matches what you hear to what you see, while retaining the emotion of a character.
As far as I know TrueSync is not a tool for automatically doing translation and generating new audio. It only syncs the lips to the dub. They call this visual dubbing. Ignore the headlines that call this movie "AI-dubbed", they are misleading and diminishing the herculean effort that goes into localization. People who cared spent many hours translating, dubbing, and editting the original Swedish film so that English-speaking audiences could experience in their art. That's a noble goal, and it should be recognized as such. As far as I know, this is the first feature-length film to use TrueSync to do lipsync.
Future movies will use this tool without taste, just like many current movies use CGI without taste. But I cannot overstate how completely convinced I was that this was an English-language movie first. I enjoyed, critiqued, and discussed this movie with no knowledge that it was a dub for hours, and I think that's beautiful.
Some among us are searching. I don't know what for. They tear up the Earth, digging holes, hoping to uncover what they cannot see. The devoted continue to excavate - the holes give way to cavernous mines. In these places you can lose bearing. The shafts can collapse, changing the landscape. A way out may no longer exist. But with enough time, the notion that forced them to dig can force them to climb. So some re-emerge from the ground after digging and clawing their way back up. And those who return always share what they have found, even when their pockets are empty.
I enjoyed watching this movie, and would watch it again.
Lots of exciting movies coming out. In order of what I'm most excited about. Each link leads to a page on this website with at least a poster, sometimes more thoughts: