Review of Moonrise Kingdom (2012) by Dafuq — 23 Sep 2012

The premise seemed very interesting, an orphan loner escapes from scout camp to elope with a young girl. The authority figures (police, scout masters) search the island trying to find them, with the help of the girls parents and the rest of the scouts.

It sounds like a classic coming of age story between two socially inept outcasts, were it conjures the isolation of adolescence and the awkwardness of youth as it enters into sexual maturity. But the film wasn't really about the story at all and this is were it fell massively short.

Moonrise kingdom is basically about how many visually symmetrical shots Wes Anderson can put onto a screen within 1 hour and 30 minutes. The colour scheme is typical Wes Anderson, vibrant red, greens, yellows and blue's, little bobble hats on most of the characters.

The man has a 5 minute sequence at the start of dolly shots going up and down a house. Then followed by a dolly shot that travels left to right tediously for about three minutes with Edward Norton as he wakes up and goes outside for breakfast.

He repeats this shot about 3-4 times during the film for similar lengths of time. When a letter appears on screen it's shot from birds eye view from above, when the main character reads a map it's shot from a birds eye view from above.

...everything is perfectly symmetrical.