2023-12-15 23:05:09
Sam Esmail is a smart guy. Nobody can deny that. He has made a name for himself through simple magic tricks that he has sold as cool and original. Nobody could locate him and suddenly he came up with a series like Mr. Robotwhich played with social discontent to propose a thriller conspiracy minded managing technology and large corporations in an addictive way. His first season became a success (Golden Globe and Emmy for best actor included) and made everyone talk about Esmail. The final twist of the first season of Mr. Robot It was already worrying, a cheap trick to surprise ahead of a second round of episodes.
Still, we bought it. What happened in the second, no. Esmail broke down and began to offer skids shielded by a risk that was never compensated by the final result. He cliffhanger that season was so tacky and tacky that you had to rub your eyes to believe it. Esmail thought he had made the end of The sixth Sense and had stayed in Resines waking up in the The Serranos. In fact, plot-wise they were not that different. The series plummeted and not many lasted until the end.
His next series, Homecoming, I was playing again thriller conspiracy, this time with the US army as a backdrop. And the same thing happened again. Esmail wasted a great idea and a great actress, Julia Roberts, in a succession of narrative and, above all, visual tricks, which were irrelevant. Esmail is one of those creators who believe they direct better if they don’t leave the camera still and play with changing the format. It may not make sense, but it looks nice.
The confirmation of all his evils as a director came with Leave the world behindthe movie that everyone is talking about and that is blowing up the rankings from Netflix (almost 100 million hours of viewing in a week). He repeats with Julia Roberts in a cast that also includes Ethan Hawke and Mahershala Ali. They are the best thing about another little kid’s party magician trick who thinks he’s David Copperfield.
Leave the world behind It is, guess what, a thriller conspiratorial And it is, guess what, a thriller as effective as it is empty. A joke that wastes its starting point (a blackout that causes chaos and the confinement of two couples of different ethnicities) in a film that builds tension through pounding music and where the camera moves as if it were set on LSD all the time. There is no explanation for the aberrant shots, the camera turns and those movements that cross walls and ceilings (The panic room It was filmed in 2002 and is much more sober in its visual games).
The film is so self-aware, so self-important, that when its (non)resolution arrives you feel cheated. Not because it doesn’t give answers, but because it hasn’t raised questions either. There is no reflection on global geopolitics, on the fears of a country that threatens the entire world, nor does it exploit the racial tension between the protagonists locked in the house. The plot only serves to create images that want to shock the viewer and that do not even surprise. We saw the deer stampede in The Ring 2 (much more terrifying), and only the crashing Teslas and the ship entering the beach offer images with some nerve.
There are good ideas wasted (that neighbor redneck, pamphlets that fall from the air), but they are not interesting in scratching something below the surface. It’s all gimmicks. A white label Nolan that confuses modernity with fireworks. It makes Sam Esmail want to give him that brilliant meme taken from a moment in The Simpsons in which Homer keeps making jokes all the time so that his mother will look at him. “Yes, yes, we already saw you,” she says (and the meme), to calm him down. Yes, yes, Sam, we saw you.
Given the data in its first week, we are going to see much more of it. And given the success we will see him with the same ways, the same accents and the same tics. A cinema that does not reflect on its staging, that puts everything at stake on script twists and that the media experts in clickbait make news with headlines like: “The end of Leave the world behind explained”. Spoiler, there are already dozens of articles with that same headline. Sam Esmail has gotten his way again.
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