Review of The East (2013) by James W — 10 Jul 2013

After watching and loving Arbitrage last year I've became a fan of Brit Marling so I was curious to see her new movie. Just like with Sound of My Voice, Marling stars and co-wrote the script. Though I haven't seen the previously mentioned film after watching The East I will most definitely check it out.

Though not perfect The East delivered on enough of what I wanted that I would consider it a success. I'll get into the specifics starting with the acting. Brit Marling was great in the lead role; you were able to feel her conflict through subtle things in her performance.

She made the audience be invested in her story instead of focusing completely on the activist group. Speaking of the group Alexander Skarsgard was good as the leader. Immediately you are able to see why these people choose to follow him into what could be deadly situations.

Ellen Page was the third headliner of this film, and she is where I start to take issue with the movie. Page isn't bad in the role, there just wasn't much there for her to do. This may have more to do with the writing than the acting, but her character wasn't developed enough.

If she had been more of a background character this would have been fine, but a lot of the third act hinges on us caring about what happens to her character, and I just didn't. A surprise for me was Toby Kebbel who played Doc.

I thought his character was well rounded and outside of Marling's character was the one I cared most for. Finally Patricia Clarkson as Marling's boss was phenomenal, but that's nothing new I just thought she was worth a mention.

The directing for this movie is solid. There was nothing that particularly jumped out at me as extraordinary. Probably the aspect I have the most problem with is the writing and plot, specifically the ending.

I'll start out by saying I actually really loved the first three-quarters of this movie. It raised interesting questions about government control and who's right and who's wrong. It also displayed the cult mentality in an interesting and thought provoking way.

Honestly I would probably give that portion of the movie a perfect five, however then the ending comes. The plot starts to step into clichés and tries to connect everything together. If this was a big budget movie I could understand the way it ended, but it's not.

When I go to these types of movies, I want to think not have everything spoon fed to me. Sometimes ambiguous endings are frustrating (i.e. The Sopranos) but here some ambiguity would have been welcome for what themes the film was trying to get across.

No spoilers but the film just kind of ends in a super predictable way that really doesn't do the rest of the film justice. Despite these problems it was still an interesting movie, that stimulated my brain more than many of the other films I've seen of late.