Review of The Truman Show (1998) by Ben L — 26 Apr 2016

The Truman Show is half of a really great movie. I love the fact that he is slowly discovering the false nature of the world around him, and piecing together the puzzle, trying to deduce why his life feels so artificial.

His mission to find the truth by behaving erratically is intriguing. In fact it might have worked better if they never clued us into the fact that it was a show until the very end, and let us try to figure out what was going on along with him.

My difficulty with this film has always been the behind-the-scenes section where we see the creators of the show, and watch them talking about the process. The sudden switch to things like a talk show interview and watching the crew manipulating Truman is out of place and stops the momentum of the movie completely.

I love Ed Harris, but he plays Christof a little too dramatically and it spoils the simple magic of the movie we watched up until that point. It's fun to watch Truman walk into a travel agency and seeing a poster of a plane disaster which says "It could happen to you!" which allows us to chuckle at the obvious lengths the producers are going through to keep him on the island.

It's much less fun to watch a group of tech guys with headsets on discussing how they need to create a traffic jam or something. I think the story of The Truman Show is engaging, and takes a good look at our reality TV culture (years before it even got started.

) I just wish they had figured out a better method of keeping the story entirely focused on Truman, and allowing us to experience the events from his perspective.