I just watched Knives Out because people told me it was just as good as Glass Onion.
It was fun, but not as good. I didn’t buy the whole ‘nice old rich man. All his kids suck so feel bad for him’ thing. Like buddy, you raised them.
Other then that it was awesome, but not as awesome as Glass Onion.
While I love the messaging behind Glass Onion, I think Knives Out is a better movie. I like both, but Knives Out I had way more fun with.
Glass Onion seems to ultimately be built on its own repeated metaphor that it has a lot of complexity and layers but ultimately you can see the simple solution. But I felt it came off as jumbled, and lacking emotional direction the entire time. It also sort of feels like it won’t let you solve it because the first half has you gather evidence then Rian Johnson subverts your expectations by telling you that everything you have gathered is wrong or backwards. I got strong TLJ vibes from Glass Onion because he seems to love the idea that by misleading you, then telling you that you mislead yourself is somehow clever storytelling. Even after dissecting the movie and liking it more after doing so, I can’t shake the idea that I just found Knives Out to be a more enjoyable movie before and after watching.
Knives Out has just as much meta commentary on society as Glass Onion. Sure, Glass Onion has the direct metaphor of every character representing America’s ruling elite and all of their status is tied to an inept billionaire that stole the work of a black person. Knives Out however goes out of its way to depict the character’s political beliefs because what he is hammering home is regardless of what their political leanings are, they all need to survive in the system and will warp their views at will to do so. Even the “lefty” girl in the movie…
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tried to guilt trip De Arma’s character into giving her a cut of the money because at the end of the day, money is all that matters.
They are all “knives out” because they have to be. We can talk about how shitty they are as people, but their actions are a reflection of living inside a capitalist system. Anyone would be at least hoping they would have a financial windfall regardless of whether they deserved it. The movie is fun because we know they don’t deserve it, but for many of them, can you really blame their reaction?
I do think Glass Onion was trying to depict just how out of touch elites are by showing what they do with their money and their time, but the setup still feels weird to the average person. It is also quite zany near the end which I felt required a conscious suspension of disbelief. Its such a strange situation that anyone sitting down and watching midway, you would have to pause and explain to them for 10 minutes what is happening. Knives Out you can just tell someone “murder mystery” and it is much more intuitive and relatable.
As a movie, Knives Out is superior.
As a complex social commentary… I think its debatable on which one is better, but maaaaybe in that respect, Glass Onion is better.
i vociferously disagree that misdirection is out of place in a mystery film. the whole point is to make sure people don’t guess the end too early—and doing the big reveal halfway through as escalating action for the climax to be character focused, that’s extremely judicious use of genre conventions. Lesser movies just reveal the mystery and oh-so-clever twists & red herrings at the end.
to be clear i mean ‘lesser movies’ that have utterly unhinged twists that are impossible to guess.
to be clear i mean ‘lesser movies’ that have utterly unhinged twists that are impossible to guess.
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You mean like one of the characters being their identical twin who hired Benoit Blanc to find to find her sisters murderer? Which only gets revealed after the twin sister gets “killed” near the climax.
exactly! but the difference is doing something like that at the final reveal vs. doing it to add stakes & layers to the original parameters. you could still guess the conclusion after the flashback.
its convention to have insane twists because mystery-readers are adept at figuring out the mystery, this stuck a nice wrench into things without undermining a final reveal imo
Understandable in what you are saying about conventions. But considering Knives Out succeeded at being a tantalizing mystery (I didn’t have the ending correctly guessed, but it made perfect sense), I don’t think my assessment of the movies is wrong. Knives Out also featured deliberately misleading elements that didn’t feel cheap or too numerous to muddle the plot.
There is a reason conventions are usually followed, because they help form a cohesive narrative. In the same manner that you imply that sticking to conventions does not make a movie good, I argue that ignoring them doesn’t make a movie clever.
The problem with Glass Onion as a movie, is that I wasn’t feeling any strong character attachment or motivation until half way through the movie. After the first twist happens…
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The main character is essentially changed.
Glass Onion’s problem isn’t that it uses misdirecting elements, its that it uses them to the point that… at least from my perspective… I tried to stop figuring out what was going on because I felt my assumption was going to be wrong anyway.
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In the end there wasn’t a big grand mystery at all, which I guess was the second twist. But a key detail was retconned in the movie (the drink hand-off) that I noticed the first time but then dismissed after seeing the false replay is sort of overstepping the misleading tactics. A detail that was critically important, yet deliberately re-represented falsely to the audience while trying to not draw too much attention to it by having characters not argue more about what they saw. In the end I felt sort of vindicated when it was brought up again as what I actually saw, but even initially I dismissed it in that moment as clearly a trick to make me think the billionaire killed him. With so many intertwining details, everything feels like it can mislead you. It feels too artificial.
But the movie’s narrative takes too long to get your skin in the game to care about what is happening. It wasn’t until the second half I started pulling for a character to succeed. Up until that point I would not have cared about the fate of any of the characters. In Knives Out there is an immediate pretext of wanting the truth so you can see true justice happen. Glass Onion is more of a rollercoaster ride of watching a privileged group of people try to figure out which one of them is the shittiest. Its an isolated island with no security and a bunch of unlikable people who you have no stake in until the narrative actually forms.
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The notion that there is no way to prove the truth becomes a plot point near the end, but again it just ends up playfully saying the truth doesn’t matter either, just what leverage exists.
My point stands that Knives Out did not have this problem. It ended up providing the same level of meta and social commentary without it leaning on its after-the-fact analysis to show why it is in fact a good movie. Don’t get me wrong, I like Glass Onion… I just think it is inferior.
Knives Out could very well be better, i didn’t rewatch it in preparation so im mostly casting Onion against other directors’ recent efforts. i suppose its a matter of taste whether or not the structure of the film suited you & how rough the smarmy lampshading will grate you.
I didn’t find that about Glass Onion, but only because I found the fact that not-Elon-Musk had done it to be blindingly obvious as soon as they did the big twist. I mean they have the guy go “well he could have but he’d have to be stupid” after lampshading how stupid he is for the last hour.
I also found Glass Onion to be more of a muder mystery in terms of setting. Contrived ways to isolate a bunch of terrible people in the Murder Zone is a standard Murder mystery plot device and one I’m quite fond of.
I still think it has too much Rian Johnson “I am trying to deconstruct things without having anything to reconstruct the thing into aren’t I clever” in it, but it was still pretty good despite that.
I did find that part to be fun in the end, simply because they explicitly said it was simpler that it looked via the whole “glass onion” metaphor. All my gut instinct was telling me he was at the root of it all yet I tried to tell myself that it wasn’t that simple. The movie actually went out of its way to tell the viewer “don’t get too distracted by the details, it really is straight forward.” He was the only one with any real motive.
It was in the second half that I felt the movie found some of its footing despite becoming more over-the-top. It felt like something that could have been figured out if you just stepped back and looked at it. My chief criticism is the first half feels clumsy and confusing after getting more clarity. It is all built on a twist of “Betcha didn’t expect it is her secret twin sister!”. It was strangely written as a big clever twist but I don’t recall any breadcrumbs leading you to believe that she should be dead. I wish it was written so the other characters were really freaked out by her like she was a ghost, even confronting her asking how she is alive because they saw a news article saying she died. Instead most of them just being uncomfortable because the prior legal battle made things awkward.
