Review of The Sea of Trees (2016) by Jin T — 26 Aug 2016

It was release on May 2015 at the Cannes Film Festival but the next year, a lot of us get to finally watch this movie.

I think this is Matthew McConaughey's best performance thus far, next to Interstellar. Even Ken Watanabe did a very good job as well and I think it's his best as well. While Naomi Watts did good as well but I think she was a stand-in for the story. Nevertheless, her character in the movie is as important as the other two.

The movie closely focus on Arthur's journey from the very beginning until the very end. Showing him how he dealt with his life, especially with his wife, Joan. When he meets Takumi, the situation was almost unrealistic all throughout the movie and provided it as a what-if experience. Which I think it was okay anyways and it's really rare to even meet someone who is even alive at the infamous suicide forest called Aokigahara.

As usual, my fascination over the culture of Japan is one of the reasons I wanted to watch this movie but it didn't really explore much about Aokigahara. It seems this movie was more like a bait for others to look up about the forest after watching the movie. There are only a couple of stories I heard about the forest and I am intrigued to explore the forest myself.

The flow of the story is pretty good and the flashbacks were not too much like season 4 Arrow was. It didn't break the flow of the story at all. Overall, the focus was Arthur's journey that somehow became spiritual along the way. Filming location, it seems it wasn't actually filmed at the forest and that they used a location in the U.S. which is more or less, familiar to the scenery. Which I'm kinda bummed out because it would have been an interesting experience to actually film at the real suicide forest. The vegetation shown in the scenes involving with Arthur and Takumi was kinda off because it didn't look exactly like the forest, but just awfully similar.

Anywho, the movie was pretty good but knowing that it didn't actuallytake place at the real suicide forest was a huge let-down and as an excuse to make a film that would have been more great. It's not just the filming location but the story irks off while masking itself to show you the struggle Arthur is going through. However, I really thought scenes with Takumi and Arthur were really good and depicted how it's like when guilt or depression really gets to you. The suicide forest has been dealt with more than 100 suicide cases per year and probably more.