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.
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…
spoiler
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.
spoiler
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.
spoiler
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.
