Review of This Is Not a Movie (2011) by Luis G — 10 May 2012

This movie falls short of it's aspirations. Having said that, it's a weird little wonderful movie. An almost perfectly undeveloped character, with no past, is thrown into his world with only one notion to hold on to, "the world is about to end". No wonder why he keeps repeating that same line over and over, like a mantra. It's a way to keep himself from accepting that he is not a full person, that the fact of the end of the world has no meaning because, since he, the protagonist, has no past, no world previous to his first appearance, the world does not really exists. It's a hallucination hallucinating. In that respect Pete could have been a nice image of humanity, obsessed with "the end", because of a lack of a sense of being.

Some things, maybe a lot of things, could have been done better, in a more intelligent way. The nature of the end of the world was given undue weight at the end of the movie, and that weakens the movie as a whole, because it's strength was it's emptiness, it's a hollow world for a hollow character. The fact that the protagonist holds on to the idea of the end of the world that fiercely could have been the core for a very interesting character study. Instead I think in that respect they went the easy way out.