Love (2011)

Who payed the critics

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

This movie is hard to see, it's dark a lot. There's not a lot of talking. It jumps back and forth between the Civil War and 2039 Space Station. Apparently, he's up there alone. Well, it's very confusing, disjointed, hard to follow. SLOW and dragging. The end is even more baffling. I don't know what happened because it is so confusing. I even went back several times to rewatch (on Netflix) to see if I missed something. I didn't. There was nothing there. Then the end is just confusing. I have no idea what happened at the end.

Confusing. Eratic. Emotionally charged for long periods with a huge expectation which never comes to fruition. Not to relax to, or laugh at, or get into, or wonder at (except perhaps for what the heck is happeing most of the time). It COULD have been a dynamite film, but it wasn't. It hinted, badly, at a great plot, while bashing my ears with mediocre trancelike musak, while cutting from one silly scene to another in an endless (or did t merely feel like endless) cycle of nothing to nothing shots of nothing but what we've seen before.We get instant gratuitous shot of the close up of a woman's arse coming straght from another unrelated scene. What does that signify? Nothing at all!We get a smoke alarm waiting until the entire ISS is filled with a toxic smoke until it rised in pitch enough to rouse this astronaut from his deep slumbers, from which he leaps, instantly awake, to dash across the entire length of the station, while clutching his tshirt to his face, to get to his face mask/respirator! Ugh!? Talk about adding stupid action/drama to break the endless boredom and FAILING!NOt sure why I didn't give this a 2. I remember someone once saying that "a true bore is someone who can go on and on about something which is the tiniest bit interesting." and this film sums it up perfectly. It always appears to be on the point of something better, revealing, telling, informing, happening, and nothing ever does. Until the last scene which is not explained or examined and does not fit at all.Perhaps the book is better? But I seriously doubt it.

This film is so ambitious and such a spectacle unto itself that it really defies reviews that spring from the typical needs of a moviegoer, and yet it really isn't quite an "art" film either. From the outset you just have no idea what is going on, and so you are forced to author your own plot in the most satisfying way. Besides a manuscript somehow lodged in the hull of the ship, What is the relationship between the eerie opening Civil War scenes and the solo mission 200 years alter? I love visual puzzles like this, and frankly they keep me loyal to the end, which may make me a weak critic. However, I want to do more than simply applaud the risks and experimentation, because I feel there is something very solid in the payoff that you truly do have to decide what to do with.

I read online that the budget for Love was $500,000. At a personal level this would be a nice lottery win, but in the film industry just a catering budget. The result is impressive to say the least, especially the Civil War scenes, which are incredible, a bravura piece of inventive film-making and editing that looks like it cost millions. The story isn't entirely original, but it is handled in an interesting way that maintains interest to the last frame. A good companion piece to Solaris (the Soviet version) for a sci-fi double bill.