Review of Nerve (2016) by Nina A — 01 Aug 2016

Ok, let's get some things straight here:

1) The trailer doesn't advertise at. all. the contents of this movie. The trailer shows something provoking and more adult-like to watch while the movie, itself, is "Twilight meets the kids of this generation today on smartphones".

2)The idea of the life spent 99% of the time on media and how media can affect today's society is very intriguing. But the more I saw of that movie, the more I laughed at how the movie didn't go in this particular direction. It could have had more dangerous and delicious material. We, as an audience, always fall back to a starting point where we don't get satisfied by the so-called climaxes that our main female protagonist s going through. For example, She didn't get to a genuine climax on a personal level (concerning possible potential problems she could have faced: if she was ever to see her mom again because her mom got kidnapped by the "anonymous" villains who created the game, or for example, they could have gone further with Sydney (the so-called mean girl) to receive more scary dares that could potentially hurt Venus.

3) Speaking of mean people in this movie, I got confused with Sydney and the weird guy Ty who wanted to kill Venus, whether I should have labelled them as mean people, or not, and when Sydney sees Ty and Ty asks her to play games with him. I thought they would have teamed up to compete with the famous couple Venus and Sam. It could have gotten much more fun, with more action, and more interesting.

4)The characters are too shallow. They are drastically moody in one night. The movie guided us to focus on the lust and seductive part of the movie, while there is no spine in the characters (we don't really see what drives them or motivates them to do what they do eccept for Sam.) The path of each character is ,therefore, too hazy and misunderstood. Venus had a self confidence problem, but what killed her personality was that we discovered that all this was because of Sydney. It could have been something deeper. No character in great movies had an external problem without an internal problem. Maybe she wanted to be like her brother, maybe her mom always used to under estimate her, so she decided to go on this quest to not just define who she really I towards her mom, but to herself because she might have had doubts about her skills.

5) there is too much said / not enough action. When Venus and Sydney fight, it ruins the whole movie. A bit of cruel action from Sydney (as I have mentioned above) could have put a bigger obstacle to Venus (and who knows? she might have put her at steak with scary dares that know no boundaries!!).

Although I liked the artistic direction of the movie, the soundtracks list, and the color palette, an most of all the costumes.