Review of Field of Dreams (1989) by Sol H — 13 Nov 2011

A film that's just full to the brim with "what the fuck is this shit?" moments.

It's regarded as a classic, although it seems to be more of a "people's classic" than a film that critics hold in particularly high regard - despite its Oscar nomination for best picture. And given that, it's amazing just how bad this film is.

The horrendously simplistic, Dan Brown-esque dialogue aside, it's just full of things that are too much to take with a grain of salt and enjoy. It's about Kevin Costner as a farmer, and one day he hears voices in his field telling him that "If you build it, they will come". He doesn't seem TOO disturbed by this voice-in-his-head thing, and his wife is supportive of it, so he makes the bizarre jump of logic that he needs to rebuild and old baseball pitch because obviously BASEBALL IS IMPORTANT.

Then he does it and ghosts start to appear. And people who 'believe' can see the ghosts, but cynics like myself can't because fuck us guys who don't live in a sugary world like the one this film is set in where everything is scored like a stock "feel good" film-trailer.

And then a load of boring stuff happens to do with Kevin needing money and going in search of old baseball players and blah blah blah. Then he just goes back in time. For no reason. With no explanation. And he tries to get this guy who became a doctor to follow his dream of being a baseball player instead. So he becomes one of the baseball players in the present.

Then at the end, his daughter falls from a meter or so and everyone is worried that she's dead so the new baseball ghost steps outside of the pitch area - breaking some sort of rule - and turns into a doctor again. He does nothing to the girl, but just says she's fine because she only fell a metre and then walks off smiling - as does basically everyone.

Then Costner's astranged father shows up as a ghost and they play catch in the attempted emotional raping's climax where supposedly everybody cries but not everybody cries because I was too happy that the film was about to end to cry. Not to mention that I wasn't invested in the cardboard characters of the preposterous and nonsensical events surrounding them, anyway.

So yeah. This film is a celebration of the sappy and overly sweet without a shred of irony. That wouldn't bother me if it didn't want me to take baseball ghosts and impromptu time-travel 100% seriously. And don't even get me started on the mildly disturbing over-importance based on the idol-worship of baseball. This film sucks.

4/10.