Stop reading this review and watch the movie already. Do it now.
Ever since Louis le Prince filmed the Roundhay Garden Scene, humanity has been blessed with cinema, absolute masterpieces that have defined our world. Films like "The Godfather", "The Truman Show", "Blade Runner 2049", "Parasite", "The Matrix" and "2001: A Space Odyssey" have inspired us, introduced household names, created childhoods and made life more worth living. But there is one movie so good, so deep, so smart that it is easily better than everything I just mentioned.
And it's this movie.
When I went to see this movie on an airplane to Rome, I was expecting a moderately enjoyable movie, not very deep but entertaining and high quality enough. What I got was a 2-hour, crazy, fun, hilarious, imaginative love letter to existence itself, a profound, unpretentious meditation on philosophy, human nature, life, nihilism and what we should do with our lives.
In any good film, most of the characters are three-dimensional. This movie has decided to go 9000 extra miles and uplift the characters into the 9999th dimension. Evelyn Wang is a smart, hardowrking, funny, likeable, relatable wife. She's also a brave hero in the likes of Frodo and Dante, an incarnation of the indominitable human spirit, who says "yes" to living no matter what and is willing to utterly annihilate nihilism, and a mother troubled by her daughter's sexuality due to her strict upbringing. Jopu Tabaki is a powerful, terrifying, tragic villain who has very realistic motives, having lost all faith in everything and embracing the void to lift the weight of expectations off of her. Every other character is just enjoyable to see.
I could say that the plot is a depressing story about a woman who loses everything after years of evading tax just to get by in the nature of "Parasite", a hero's journey to save everything turned a heroic effort to make both sides understand and reconcile with each other like "The Matrix" trilogy, and a coming-of-age about a girl trying to find her way in the world after losing everything. I'd still be off the mark by a little bit. It's so much more than that, taking influences from all the great masterpieces of old to transcend them all, like Jopu Tabaki was forced to transcend by learning every skill and ability imaginable.
The moral of the story is one of the greatest parts. The themes are so unimaginably timeless and universal that it's insane no one made a film about them before. It's not about how life still has meaning despite the universe's size, or how existence is meaningless and nothing you do matters so you can do anything you want to achieve. Rather, it tries to reconcile and debate both sides of our thoughts in the most mature, honourable way. It leaves you to think for yourself about who is right, because that's for you to decide. No one can tell you everything there is to know about universal questions easily like that, you have to find it yourself.
But the best part of the movie? It gets unimaginably weird and stupid, but rather than drag down the quality of the movie to a garish, pretentious flick, it lifts the movie's quality unimaginably higher than anything else I've ever seen. It uses the sheer weirdness to become highly authentic and original. It's not generic at all.
This is the greatest movie of all time. I mean every word of it. It doesn't deserve any oscars, but its own philosophical cult. It doesn't deserve to be put in the Library of Congress, but to be encoded in the fundamental level of existence itself.
Ever since Louis le Prince filmed the Roundhay Garden Scene, humanity has been blessed with cinema, absolute masterpieces that have defined our world. Films like "The Godfather", "The Truman Show", "Blade Runner 2049", "Parasite", "The Matrix" and "2001: A Space Odyssey" have inspired us, introduced household names, created childhoods and made life more worth living. But there is one movie so good, so deep, so smart that it is easily better than everything I just mentioned.
And it's this movie.
When I went to see this movie on an airplane to Rome, I was expecting a moderately enjoyable movie, not very deep but entertaining and high quality enough. What I got was a 2-hour, crazy, fun, hilarious, imaginative love letter to existence itself, a profound, unpretentious meditation on philosophy, human nature, life, nihilism and what we should do with our lives.
In any good film, most of the characters are three-dimensional. This movie has decided to go 9000 extra miles and uplift the characters into the 9999th dimension. Evelyn Wang is a smart, hardowrking, funny, likeable, relatable wife. She's also a brave hero in the likes of Frodo and Dante, an incarnation of the indominitable human spirit, who says "yes" to living no matter what and is willing to utterly annihilate nihilism, and a mother troubled by her daughter's sexuality due to her strict upbringing. Jopu Tabaki is a powerful, terrifying, tragic villain who has very realistic motives, having lost all faith in everything and embracing the void to lift the weight of expectations off of her. Every other character is just enjoyable to see.
I could say that the plot is a depressing story about a woman who loses everything after years of evading tax just to get by in the nature of "Parasite", a hero's journey to save everything turned a heroic effort to make both sides understand and reconcile with each other like "The Matrix" trilogy, and a coming-of-age about a girl trying to find her way in the world after losing everything. I'd still be off the mark by a little bit. It's so much more than that, taking influences from all the great masterpieces of old to transcend them all, like Jopu Tabaki was forced to transcend by learning every skill and ability imaginable.
The moral of the story is one of the greatest parts. The themes are so unimaginably timeless and universal that it's insane no one made a film about them before. It's not about how life still has meaning despite the universe's size, or how existence is meaningless and nothing you do matters so you can do anything you want to achieve. Rather, it tries to reconcile and debate both sides of our thoughts in the most mature, honourable way. It leaves you to think for yourself about who is right, because that's for you to decide. No one can tell you everything there is to know about universal questions easily like that, you have to find it yourself.
But the best part of the movie? It gets unimaginably weird and stupid, but rather than drag down the quality of the movie to a garish, pretentious flick, it lifts the movie's quality unimaginably higher than anything else I've ever seen. It uses the sheer weirdness to become highly authentic and original. It's not generic at all.
This is the greatest movie of all time. I mean every word of it. It doesn't deserve any oscars, but its own philosophical cult. It doesn't deserve to be put in the Library of Congress, but to be encoded in the fundamental level of existence itself.
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