Seeing how much I loved last year’s Social Network, I decided to visit one of David Fincher’s earlier movies, the much acclaimed Se7en. Going in, I had no idea what to expect from the movie, except that it was kind of a really dark cop drama. But after watching it, I can safely say this about Se7en: it’s an amazing film, and I kind of hate it.
One of the things that drew me to the film was the cast: Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt in the main roles, both of whom put up amazing performances as per usual. The plot itself started off really well. The premise of the film is this series of seven murders, each symbolising one of the seven deadly sins, while Freeman and Pitt race against the clock to apprehend the serial killer. Neat stuff. Though it’s evident from the get-go that this movie was going to have really dark themes to it. It’s sort of a “horror” film according to Wikipedia, but everything’s more tense rather than horrifying. No doubt, some scenes are pretty gross, though they’re all artfully shot such that they accentuate rather than take away from the story.
Not to mention there’s this foot chase in the middle of the film, which might be one of the greatest foot chases of all time. Amazingly tense. Largely due to the fact that you have a cop chasing down a criminal that has outsmarted everyone at every turn, you have no idea what the smart alec was going to do.
At the end of the day though, this movie is just too damn depressing for me. Great premise, great plot, great twists in the story, really nicely shot. But ultimately not a very pleasant movie to watch. The way the plot unravels, and especially the ending, is just so bleak. Nothing good ever happens to the good guys throughout the movie. It doesn’t help that none of the characters (even the good guys) appeal to me. The extent to which the characters are fleshed out reach the bare minimum for them to have any character to begin with, and with any lesser actors everything would have completely fallen apart.
The random conversations between characters that are inserted between plot scenes are sort of “philosophical” in nature, and you can kind of feel the writers trying to shoehorn themes into random conversations that have almost nothing to do with the main plot. Of course these kinds of “irrelevant” conversations are kind of a staple of movies from the ’90s.
Anyway, I’ll say it again. This is a really great movie, well-deserving of its critical acclaim. And I hate it.
It’s really weird. The iPad has been out in the market for almost a year already, and up till now not a single other manufacturer can even come close to achieving similar success with tablets. A couple of these tablets are kind of “almost but not quite”, while most of them are simply downright dreadful. I mean to begin with Apple didn’t innovate all THAT much when they created the first iPad. They just took an iPod touch and enlarged it, fiddled around with the software to make it fit a bigger screen, and put it out. For something that isn’t that groundbreaking in terms of tech, the iPad is amazingly successful.