Review of Dead Poets Society (1989) by Jesús G — 27 Feb 2011

I remember I used to love this movie two years ago. But I re-watched it recently and realized how much it actually sucks. My main reasons for saying this are that not only was the storyline really predictable and Williams' character lacking in depth, but also that the movie insults literature (by throwing around names of poets extremely out of context) and recycles material from "A Separate Peace" and other works.

The suicide scene would have had a greater impact for me if it had seemed like a spontaneous human cry of despair, rather than like a meticulously written and photographed set piece. On top of that, the teacher was more of a plot device than a character, which is why I felt no sympathy for him when he got fired. You'd think that at the end of a great teacher's course in poetry, the students would love poetry; but at the end of this teacher's semester, all they really love is the teacher.

If you're gonna evoke Henry David Thoreau as the patron saint of your movie, then you'd better make a movie he would have admired. Here is one of my favorite sentences from Thoreau's Walden, which I recommend for serious study by the authors of this film: " . . . instead of studying how to make it worth men's while to buy my baskets, I studied rather how to avoid the necessity of selling them.".