A Sacrifice

Movies this year are either a tight hour and a half or nearly 3 hours long and there doesn’t seem to be a solid in between. The problem here is that the movies that are an hour and half could benefit from being another 30 minutes long and the ones that are over 2 hours could easily cut 30 minutes. No one seems to know where their story’s sweet spot is anymore and that is just a major bummer. Now this was a short rant in response to A Sacrifice but it could be applied to just so many films this year.

I am having a hard time keeping up with these up and coming, younger A-listers. Not to sound old or anything but I know Sadie Sink is a biggish deal right now I just have no idea who she is.

A Sacrifice is yet another thriller, as there have been so many this year. Ridley Scott was partially responsible for this and we can tell because it has astonishingly low ratings. With 25% on Rotten Tomatoes, not that RT is a great source of a film’s quality but 25% is pretty low.

The story centers on a daughter reuniting with her father in Berlin. She meets this boy on her way to her dads apartment. She starts at a new school, she starts a life.

Well we are 20 minutes in and we are struggling for an actual plot here. We’ve done a lot of introductions but at this point in an hour and a half long film we should know what our goal is. We are at the end of act one and there is no jumping off point yet…that’s not great. It seems like they are attempting to make two different plots run concurrently but it's just not gelling together. The thing about structure is that if you choose to have a shorter film then your pacing needs to be flawless. In a longer film you have a bit of wiggle room. But with an hour and a half you really really dont. So anything that drags on too long is going to be extremely obvious. It also undercuts your ending, because you are backing yourself into a spot where you have to rush the ending in order to get everything wrapped up.

Well Martin is in a cult. This is a cult. An environmentalist cult. Cause decomposing bodies are totally good for the environment.

This movie is further proof that teenagers are stupid…even 16 year old me would have rejected all this “be one with the community” bullshit.

The cult is fostering these suicides, okay sure. But dad is still super disconnected from this plotline. I feel like the writers had two different stories they wanted to tell and just decided to combine them. That literally never works.

Yeah the cult plot was really lost…they didn’t know what they were doing. There was no eeriness or tension built up at all. The existence of dad and his marital problems was entirely irrelevant. As was his job and involvement with the police. It should have focused on the daughter the whole time. It wasn’t especially well acted. The cop being a part of the cult too should have been set up better, felt very shoehorned in. 0/10, sorry complete waste of space and time. It had a good concept but every single aspect of the execution was poor. I hate movies that had potential but actually suck, if the movie was bad from the jump it would be so much better.