If you’re getting wound up by this years Oscar lists, then please rest assure that movie awards are pointless marketing doodahs, handed out through a combination of marketing, indifference, and stupidity. My evidence for that statement is that this film has won 16 awards and been nominated for another 15, for acting, direction, and production, when it’s less cinematically fulfilling than the NFT adverts YouTube holds your time ransom with.

It starts tepidly with an uninspired but mostly passable apocalypse, before moving into a narrator telling you how awesome the film will be whilst the opening credits play. I originally planned on transcribing them out, but I rapidly hit stop once I realised doing that would involve me watching this film again. Very simply put, it wrote a gigantic cheque that it absolutely failed to payout on, and that front loading of promise was the least of it’s mistakes.

From what little I can remember of the story, dragged far to thinly across it’s bloated 104 minutes run time, it was just about serviceable. There were also plenty of individual lines that worked, and for a movie made for less than £5000 it looks perfectly adequate. The SFX are a bit ropey, but that’s a matter of time and money which I’m not going to hold against anyone.

What I am going to object to is the pacing, because this is the most painfully drawn-out film I’ve watched for years. The whole thing needed editing down and having some life injected into it. Ever visual, every line, ever single moment outstays it’s welcome.

Similarly, the performances were a brutal display of nothing much. I can’t blame the actors for this though, as the consistency of their monotony meant it had to be guided by directorial decisions. Also it appears that most of the shots were done with only one actor present, so the inexperienced cast had no one to work off of. The few moments with two people on screen at once had a bit more life to them, but the theory was floated during the first interminable hour that mankind had been destroyed and all that was left were replicants that didn’t know they were replicants.

To add to the boredom, the directorial and editing styles were below Paint Trying (2016) for dynamism and diversity. Writer, director, and editor Flynn Moores demonstrates a deep passion for three shots but no understanding of how to make them look good or, more importantly, how to have the audience give a single shit about any of what’s happening in them.

Whilst there are plenty of overtures to better works, especially in the promotional material, there is no understanding of what made them enjoyable. I have nothing good to say about it, and offer this review as a warning rather than a temptation. If you had told me the whole thing was AI-generated I wouldn’t have been surprised, although such a film would probably have had more interesting moments. This is Trash of the worst kind, a grey wash of time-eating futility with no payoff on any level.

The Raggedyman