There seems to be this border region
between good and bad movies. It’s
somewhat difficult to define. A movie
could be undone by any number of factors.
Having talent and money don’t necessarily promise a great movie. It could have everything going for it and
still fail due to bad timing.
Then, there are movies like The Vast of
Night. I get the sense that the movie is
trying to say something. It seems like
one of those esoteric pieces that uses tricks and techniques to say
things. Is the writer being deliberately
vague or was it just not written very well?
When I saw it available to stream on
Amazon, I decided to give it a shot. I
like exactly that sort of sci-fi movie.
It seemed to maybe take itself a little too seriously, but that was
ok. I have 89 minutes to spare. Why not?
I’ll tell you why not. The movie seems to take itself way too
seriously. It’s presented as an episode
of a Twilight Zone-type show with a narrator that sounds exactly like Rod Serling. (The fictional town is even called Cayuga.) It starts with Fay and Everett leaving a
basketball game to go to their respective jobs.
(She’s a switchboard operator and he’s a DJ.)
When Fay starts having technical issues,
she calls Everett. Some calls are being
dropped and other lines have some weird noise on them. So, Everett broadcasts the noise, asking if
anyone can identify it. What follows is
a sort of X-Files wannabe plot line, where Fay and Everett go chasing down
little green men.
Unfortunately, the movie never goes
anywhere. You might think that the movie
leaves things open to the viewer. I
would counter that by saying the movie suffers from lazy writing. Close Encounters of the Third Kind left things
open to the viewer. It had the same
basic plot, but captured the viewers’ attention. It at least had direction and gave us
something to think about.
The Vast of Night doesn’t have
that. It’s almost like Close Encounters
for beginners. It lacks any sort of
tension or suspense. There’s no legend
versus reality. It’s just two people
telling their stories and part of one is secondhand.
It’s a shame, because the movie is great
on a technical level. It has great
production values and is well acted. It
just lacks any sort of a hook. I think
most people are going to be bored with this before the main story gets going
and I can’t even say that there’s anything wrong with that.
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