Until Dawn

Sometime last year, long before we knew the film was happening, my husband had me play Until Dawn. Now as someone who isn’t an avid gamer (I’ve got a few hundred hours of Baldur’s Gate 3 and Dreamlight Valley clocked but that’s about it), I loved it. I loved the story and I had a great time, then we saw the trailer for the movie annnnnd, I didn’t have a lot of hope.

Okay so right off the bat we aren’t doing great. I really hate the way it's shot, it really feels like the indiest of indy films and I mean that in the most derogatory way. It’s not good. It feels like it was shot by someone who thinks their angles and pan shots are interesting but really they just feel like they don’t know what they are doing.

Also the way that they adapted the story, as a fan of the game and the movie’s target demographic, was inherently wrong. The base story of the game did not need any changes or adjustments NONE, it was literally perfect. The execution of the choose your adventure element is already a shaky decision, changing the actual story foundations was stupid.

The complicated dynamics between the friends are what made the dialogue and relationships interesting. This whole “we need to stick together vibe” is terrible and boring.

Let’s not pretend a teenager in 2025 knows how to use a rotary phone…

Ugh these deaths are so bad also, seriously they are gory as hell and so rapid fire for no reason. And Meg having some sort of a supernatural connection is so dumb. Honestly this could not be anymore poorly executed. If you were going to change literally everything from the movie why call it Until Dawn? In reality it's Groundhog Day meets Until There Were None, but a poorly executed version of both. Also the invisible force attacking them? The wendigo twist was the best part of the game. Guys I might not be able to suffer through this whole movie. I've never wanted to not finish a film so much.

They are all also just dying for no reason, it's random and there is no connection to anything. It's the choices you make in the game that get them killed or keep them alive. These deaths don’t mean anything because they aren’t tied to any choices being made, they are just happening. This has got to be the laziest written movie I’ve ever seen. Just a bunch of garbage on my screen right now.

Wow, the Wendigo exposition was terrible. Also Wendigo aren’t invisible and it in fact explains none of the random deaths we’ve seen so far. What an impressively expensive waste of time.

Random flashback to the sister that comes into the film too late for any kind of emotional pull. You know what had great emotional ties? The original game plot.

And now we are on their “final night” so they are playing out the whole thing and now the pace is dragging. This movie had absolutely no clue what it wanted to be or what the point was, it has no theme. This film is a whole lot of nothing. The random masked guy, that is in fact random because they sucked all the plot out of this film.

Look this is my first video game adaptation, how do you guys do this? Are gamers not frustrated all the time? This is terrible. I’ve never seen source material destroyed so completely and thoroughly. I think as a film without my personal emotions in it it's a 0/10, with my extremely biased anger it's a -10/10.