Review of Life Itself (2018) by The3Academysins — 03 Feb 2019

Life Itself is easily the worst movie of 2018. It is also one of the most offensive, insulting, and insipid movies I have ever had the misfortune of watching. Dan Fogleman's script is nothing short of emotionally manipulative drivel. I almost can't believe that he wrote and directed this hack-job.

The biggest problem with Life Itself is that it doesn't trust the audience to understand and make connections with the characters. It sets up contrived plot devices and tragedies with no originality and then has the balls to laud itself unironically as "unique and original." It has the unmitigated STONES to compare itself to Pulp Fiction. This movie is nothing like Pulp Fiction. If anything, Life Itself is a less-good rip-off of 500 Days of Summer and Manchester By The Sea, but it doesn't even understand how those two movies work.

The premise of Life Itself is that there are two families tied together by a single traumatic event. Characters are drowned in horrible tragedies, there is a Spanish sub-plot that feels tacked on, and the fact that the script tries to tie it all together at the end to make a profound statement is so degrading that the only real tragedy is that I wasted my time watching this movie at all. The movie's theme is "Life Itself is the ultimate unreliable narrator." The movie has no problem spoon-feeding you this theme and saying it out loud word-for-word multiple times during the movie. Talk about a stupid waste of a title-drop. I loved This Is Us, but now I am convinced that Dan Fogelman is a jack off.