Review of Under the Skin (2014) by Horusmaximus — 15 Jul 2014

Well, 95% of the people out there are not going to like this at all. They beat you over the head with their ham-handed attempt to be artsy drawing out monotonous scenes way beyond the point where you "get it" to the point where you press the fast forward button... alot. That will be how you'll watch this, finger never leaving the fast-forward button. Unless you are stoned... then you might not notice you've been staring at a dot on the screen for 15 minutes, or looking at someone sitting in their vehicle doing NOTHING for 5- 10 minutes for the 5th time. Fast-forward is your friend.

I'm giving it a 3 for these reasons, Scarlett Johansson takes her close off a lot (+2 initially then -1 for somehow making that monotonous), its science fiction (+2 but taking a point back after reading about the book it was based on and realizing they've ruined any chance of ever getting to see a decent movie based on that premise), and I'll give them another point for using actors that didn't initially know they were in a movie. Again, this is something I didn't know when I sat down to watch it but after reading up on the production, I thought that was worthy of a point for initiative and an uncommon approach to filming a sci fi movie.

It might have made a really good short film of about 20 minutes or less, but utterly fails as a feature film. They just really obviously had to stretch out the monotony to drag things out to the number of minutes they felt they needed. Watch the first 5 minutes. Turn it off. If you still feel compelled to watch it, you'll probably be in that 5% that likes to be hypnotised or something. The rest of you will thank me for the hour and a half or so of your lives I've just saved you. I'll split the difference with you and you can send me what a couple hours of your time is worth to my PayPal account.