Speaking of entertainment, here is a review of "The Midnight After" by a Rotten Tomatoes audience reviewer, i.e. not a professional movie critic. He says it much more eloquently than I did
- and I've replaced his full spelling with appropriate * to keep his original intent from being bleeped out..
I don't even know where to begin with this movie if I'm being completely honest. I guess first things first, as there is no description for this movie, I'll start with that. A group of people riding the minibus emerge from a tunnel only to discover that they are the only people left in Hong Kong. The rest of the film deals with that fact and how the group tries to figure out what exactly went wrong with them when they passed under that tunnel
Look, the film doesn't get the rating it did because it was bad. If you look at some of the scenes out of context, then the film isn't really that bad at all. The problem is that you should not come into the film expecting any answers whatsoever. Like absolutely none. None of your questions about what happened will be answered at any point whatsoever. The goal for the characters, after a certain point, becomes to leave where they're at to head to this mountain, where it seems like something massive is about to happen. The problem is the fact that the movie ends just as the characters are, back on the minibus, on the way to the mountain.
Talk about f*cking infuriating. Having to watch an entire movie of red herrings, because that's all this is, for 2 god damn, mother f*cking hours only for them to not actually resolve any of the bullsh*t they try to push as a 'narrative'. Not to mention that they refuse to answer any of your questions, but the movie literally makes no sense whatsoever. Part of me gets the idea to be as vague as humanly possible on the build-up to the climax, the filmmakers want to keep you as much in the dark as the characters themselves are. But to spend 2 hours building up to this and then refusing to, literally, answer any of the questions you set up is so f*cking cheap.
I have no problem with films leaving their endings more open-ended, but in those cases, they do at least try to give you enough answers for you to debate what really happened. There's no such thing here. All you know is that there's some sort of virus. You never find out how it travels, if it's airborne, if it's by having contact with someone with the virus, you don't know what the song Major Tom by David Bowie has to do with anything, the F*kushima nuclear disaster is brought up, there's also a Japanese guy that apparently was a student of one of the passengers in the minibus that wants to help save all of the passengers, there's the phone call to one character by his girlfriend who, apparently, says that they have been missing for six years and it's actually 2018, this character seeing this woman, who was also on the minibus, as sort of a ghostly figure in some scenes. I'm sure I missed other plot points the film tried to get across, but that's just the tip of the iceberg.
All of those things the film brings up without actually answering any of them. And this isn't the type of movie that's so interesting that you want to try and figure it out on yourself like The Wall, an excellent Austrian movie. It's just not that interesting of a movie. There's parts at the start that are interesting, like once they find themselves in this situation, I was intrigued by the plot, but I quickly lost hope. I can't say that I predicted that nothing would be resolved, but my subconscious probably wasn't surprised by this at all. The film also suffers from some horrifying tonal shifts. Sometimes the film wants to be horror, sometimes it wants to be comedy, sometimes it wants to be about how human are the real monsters. All of these elements are handled awfully. It's like you're watching 17 films in one.
You know what, now that I think about it, this film was quite bad. But it's also not bad at the same time, it's the strangest thing. The movie tried to be clever, but they wrote themselves into a corner in regards of how to end it. So to avoid having to think of absolutely anything resembling a satisfying ending, or anything resembling an ACTUAL ending, they just refused to give you one. These are 2 hours of my life that I can never get back. Never. And I f*cking hate myself for watching this. Maybe that's a little harsh, but this movie is really annoying. I wonder what would have happened if I knew beforehand that this movie would have no ending. I don't think it would've changed anything. I would have still been as pissed off as I am now. This film was designed to be infuriating, it wasn't designed to be enjoyed. It's as if Fruit Chan decided to just make a movie that would piss off as many people as humanly possible. And I don't know if it worked, since I don't know how many people in Hong Kong watched this, but it certainly pissed me off. And I know I shouldn't let a film annoy me this way, it has too much power over me that way, but I really hated watching this. It's a terrible movie and it's something that no one should ever actually make an effort to watch.
