Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery – Bad Writing
filmcolossus.com
filmcolossus.com
This article says it should have played it straight. I think that would have made for a more standard, boring movie. But whatever, that's just opinion.
But I think it is silly to call it bad writing. Bad implies that the writer didn't have command of their craft. It is clearly all very deliberate and designed to create something surprising in a genre where that is very difficult. Like it or hate it, at least it tried something instead of just being another remake of Agatha Christie's "And Then There Was One".
It’s fine to dislike the movie; about 7% of critics and moviegoers do, according to rotten tomatoes. But at least have the grace to understand it.
You may or may not be right about the ideas in Glass Onion being trivial, but how blind must the author of this clickbait review have been to not even notice that literally Yo-Yo Ma, literally playing himself, literally sets up the movie’s structure and explains why it plays out the way it does, in one of the first scenes? You can think that’s dumb, but you can’t ignore it when writing a critique!
This supposed revelation of “bad writing” is just clickbait from someone who didn’t understand the (yes, blatant! yes, arguably trivial!) structure the movie was exploring.
What's the point? Might as well just make it an action movie.
I haven't seen the movie yet, but I know this much: you can't cheat.
If you do, and you keep some fundamental fact hidden until the last minute, or if you use some kind of magic, or if the murderer was a complete outsider, or if the victim died by accident and nobody's guilty, or, God forbid! if it turns out the victim isn't actually dead, or it was all a dream... then the audience gets angry. Sometimes very angry. That may be what happened here.
To paraphrase Walter Sobchak, this isn't 'Nam. There are rules to writing detective stories.
I'm 100% sure Rian Johnson was aware of these rules as the writer. I'd say Glass Onion technically violates 2 of them, but only for the first hour of the movie. Then you get let in on the cheating before the main climax of the movie.
[1] https://agathachristie.fandom.com/wiki/The_%E2%80%9CRules%E2...
But the movie showed fake video to hide what really happened. Only at the end did they show the real video.
Sherlock Holmes always does. Poor Watson, encumbered by reality like the audience, can't see the clues that suddenly appear only to Holmes just in time to announce the "obvious" truth.
The only way I can see people getting angry at the film is if they go into it with a set of checkboxes they want to tick, or want to solve the crime along with (or ahead of!) the main character. But then at that point they're sort of setting themselves up to be angry.
I saw and enjoyed the first installment of Knives Out. I don't have a beef with the filmmaker, or the series, or the actors, or the genre.
I'm just saying that detective fiction in general should follow a certain formula and if you stray too far away from it, most of the time, it doesn't turn into a wonderful new recipe but simply fails. In general.
Is it the case for this film in particular? I have no idea!
Spare me the pat on the back. Or oh! the plot twist. That's not what makes a movie, although it certainly can break it.
We may strongly disagree here, but I think "cheating" is an essential part of great movie making.
A good movie is all about telling a great story in an immersive way. If the director "cheats" her way through that story, be it for budgetary reasons or even to just move the story forward in a way that grips you, well, more power to her.
Seems just lazy and lame.
Yo-Yo ma sets up the flashbacks, and the structure of the movie as a fugue. A melody thats played upon and expanded.
The first reveal that the writer says 'renders the movies first hour pointless..' is an example of that. Benoits seeming fawning of Miles, 'inadvertant' needling of his intelligence (childish puzzles) are shown to be part of Blancs own deceit.
And in fact all, the flashbacks extend information you already knew, Duke, Whisky and, Miles, for example. That's the smart thing about these dumb murders, its in the composition itself, and not the characters, or the plot driving it.
I had a whale of time watching it, and loved the mundanity of the crimes and the fact it was just dumb people in this rich persons playworld.
The mystery is dull, the dialogue obnoxious, the jokes unfunny, and the camera has that patented ugly digital Netflix look.
By the time the movie picks up about an hour in, I had long stopped caring. It’s a shame because I enjoyed the first one. It’s a shocking drop in quality.
I’m wondering if Netflix gave him much greater creative freedom, and if the original movie would have been much worse without studio notes.
And I’m not sure why the year even matters for the plot.
COVID allows a shortcut to describing each character. The detective is depressed and bored. Birdie ignores lockdown restrictions and throws massive parties. The scientist is alone in his lab working the whole time. Duke built a home studio and spent his life online, etc. And Miles has a cure/vaccine for COVID but only uses it for his personal benefit. He never even shares it with his "friends" until they will be around him.
Among Us is supposed to show that the detective is bad at lying and sneaking around. This is later proven false, but it builds the expectation it goes against in the future.
Zoom and similar software is a good way to have characters talk to each other. A decade ago the same scene would have happened with everyone using a cellphone and the viewer at home getting the same view.
Meanwhile Twitch as a way that someone can become a famous influencer just seems about correct. Would you rather they just had a blog?
You could replace them with some generic thing, I suppose. But how would that make the movie better?
Meanwhile, if you eliminate them, the story gets worse. Unlike most product placements, which are at best removable background and at worse make the movie worse.
Meanwhile, I imagine Zoom arose naturally to solve the speakerphone but still need to see characters issue. I'm guessing Among Us was added because someone on the set played it and thought it would add something, and Twitch seems like the best real-life example of someplace that you would expect a modern tech mogul to help someone set up a streaming channel. Far from being tacked in, those seem like the best possible solutions to those problems.
And COVID is a fact now. You could release a movie in NYC in 2003 with the Twin Towers still in them, but I don't think people would claim you were being "hip" removing them. They would say you seem out of touch for leaving them in. Even if the story was set in "indefinite past time when they still could have existed"
If you showed the NYC skyline in 2003, you’d have to go out of your way to show the Twin Towers. Edward Norton saying how “pando” changed things, on the other hand, is going out of your way in the opposite direction.
I feel like the early-00s equivalent of this movie would be the CGI dancing baby on Ally McBeal (“justified” by the character’s ticking biological clock), except almost every scene would have one such meme or topical reference.
Were they obviously added because they were recent things and not timeless, yes. But I don't see how ignoring recent events would have been good either. Instead, if you're trying to write how out of touch tech billionaires are to the current world, you have to show the current world.
How do you even have a character like Duke divorced from the current environment?
Today's mystery, tomorrow's "beach blanket?" Haven't seen it, but if it's campy enough, it could have staying power.
Janelle Monae smashes open a mystery box with a hammer, which is direct commentary on JJ Abrams Mystery Box writing.
This movie is very very well written. Nearly every detail is paid off.
Reminded me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordian_Knot
My first struggle with the movie is that it breaks the first rule of a good mystery story in that you need the audience to have enough information that they can plausibly solve the crime themselves. Glass Onion only provides information when it becomes relevant to move the plot along. You could have never known certain things, you could have never even guessed at them because the information did not exist right up until it was needed in the story.This happens repeatedly. Midway through there is a plot twist that you could have never guessed or seen coming and that pretty much ends any sense of suspense or intrigue.
I also don't care about any of the people in the story as people or characters nor do I find any of their relationships convincing. It seems implausible that any of them would have ever been friends. Close your eyes and imagine these people hanging out at a bar together and you can't. How did they interact? What was their friendship like? You never see it and so the weight of the strain of the existing relationship isn't ever fully felt. The characters in a "Knives Out" were caricatures too, but they were family, not friends. Everyone knows that strain. Everyone can relate to that relationship dynamic. You don't get to choose family. Friends tend to match each other to some extent. Give them some kind of connection. They are all trivia nerds and were a trivia team. Anything.
With all that said, I want to rewatch "Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery." I want to see how much was visible in scene. How much could I have technically figured out. It is an interesting movie, I am just not sure it is a very good one.
Certainly it's not a bad movie. I'm just not sure it really hangs together at the end of the day.
I feel like I disliked Murder on the Orient Express more for that exact rule.
But I do feel like Glass Onion does in fact deliver to some degree in that aspect. In the first part of the movie when you're lead to believe that it's about the murder of Miles, they do establish motives in order to have the viewers thinking of who it could be. And after the mid-twist that the focus shifts to the true murder mystery, there is a profound lack of good hints because it's not any one of the fingered suspects. If you watch the movie and think to yourself "Who would benefit the most from this murder?", all fingers point at the true suspect.
My biggest problem with the Glass Onion is the peashooter gun.
Where does it say she didn't journal about the software? And - imagining said entry - even if you could prove the date the entry was written, it's still just hearsay against the testimony of 4 others.
The shot lingers on literally the same facial expression when she arrives on the island as when he first sees her again after he shoots her.
"Why isn't he playing 5D chess?" has the same answer in the movie as it often does in the real world: He's actually just not that smart. This becomes especially clear after his reaction to Blanc pointing out he's basically set himself up to get murdered by any one of them.
The film missed a couple of beats for me, so it isn't perfect by any means (neither was Last Jedi!), but it was really entertaining and clever.
A similar response was made to Passengers[1], where if it is NOT made chronologically, the director could have an opportunity to push the theme entirely close to a horror genre.
Don't know about that. I've heard that if you watch Memento in chronological order, it is very uninteresting.
The Circle is another one. If ever a film called out for a satirical take on its source material, it was that one.
I personally enjoyed it, not quite as much as I enjoyed the original and I imagine there are people who didn't particularly like it. That's totally fine, everyone has different tastes, but I find it hard to believe these people truly hated the movie as much as they claim. It feels a bit performative.
Edit: added warning
BTW I thought the punishment was very good writing. As long as he's rich, all will lie to protect him. Once the source of his money - which is he reputation of Klear - is destroyed, all of them stop lieing to cover for him. I thought it highlighted their hypocrisy exceptionally well.
Or launch an unsafe product for the general public?
I was sorta expecting that they would point out that Miles was himself taken in by the Louvre, and given a museum shop print. But it doesn't work with the film's final gag, so I guess it's just an error.
Ah, well. I don't take mystery movies too seriously for just that reason. It was fun and I enjoyed it.
> Thematically, Glass Onion is showing how terrible people gain power.
I don't think that assertion is even close to correct. In fact, I think you have to work pretty hard to avoid seeing the actual theme. It's called Glass Onion for gods' sakes. It's not about terrible people. It's about appearances! It's about seeing people for what they are! It's called Glass Onion. What happens when you peel back the layers of a glass onion? It looks exactly the same. I don't know how to explain how much more obvious the theme was meant to be other than continually repeating the name of the movie... Look, read the name of the movie, that's the theme.
I think trying to get ou the rule book for this movie and scoring it is an unsatisfying prospect, because it doesn't play by those rules, so it doesn't care.
If you have any direct questions, let me know and I’ll do my best to answer.
Have a great end of 2022 and start of 2023!
Also, Darth Vader is Luke's father, Snape kills Dumbledore, and Bruce Willis is dead the whole movie.
Honestly, if you're reading an article about movie X, then IMHO it is reasonable to assume that any spoiler warnings would be specific to movie X. If an article is going to spoil movies A, B, and C as well, then the spoiler warning text should make note of that.
Interesting discussion on movie discussion etiquette though. I never really considered how much time is “long enough” to get into a movie’s plot details.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2022/12/26/glass-onio...
Destroying the Mona Lisa is worth it because it punishes Brons.
The movie had some high points and I thought it was fun, but the story had many flaws. I think it’s best not to overthink it too much.
I think the twist was good actually, and you see why Miles was so shocked that Andi shows up to the party. That would have made the first hour of the movie more interesting.
My nitpick is that Peg felt mostly extraneous - the main plot beat conversation with Peg could've been a conversation with Birdie directly. (And Derol is already present as the extraneous-for-the-sake-of-it element.)
Then this person has not seen very many movies.
> And now Glass Onion will haunt me for the rest of my days.
I don't care too much for this superlative, unduly passionate style of pop culture critique even if it is a joke.
I enjoy reading negative critique of movies I like, as long as it shows understanding that reasonable people can disagree. This is not that.
The entire Jedi thread throughout all of Star Wars is like that. An over 20-year old essay by David Brin goes into this at length. https://www.davidbrin.com/nonfiction/starwars1.html
I didn't love the sequel trilogy--though it was better than the prequels. (Although truth be told, the Phantom Menace and Jar-jar in particular so poisoned the well for the prequels that I think otherwise #2 and #3 would have been looked on more favorably. See also Machete order.)
Also the prequel trilogy made a good case for the ineptitude of the Jedi order, they allow themselves to be manipulated into fighting a war orchestrated by a sith Lord and overlook several red flags coming from anakin.
It honestly felt like it was made by people who had a legitimate contempt for the franchise.
Also had several plot holes, poor fight choreography, and dumb dialogue. Plus the whole tone of it was off, like when the movie seemingly ends on a positive note after the entire resistance is wiped out.
That's just from the top of my head, but I do loath The Last Jedi.
The other half was Clones which arguably could have been treated as just as disposable as the droids and also been effective suicide pilots.
It's funny that the one single time on the entire series when things loose in deep space behave like if they weren't falling somewhere is the one people keep complaining about.
Anyway, the last 3 movies has a really great storyline that was completely destroyed by any other aspect you can pick. So the things people choose to complain are quite arbitrary. But this one is funny.
It was a weird fever dream of a movie even for a franchise that brought us a giant space slug gangster and a backwards talking green puppet
7-9 were better than 1-3, but last jedi was undoubtedly the worst of the new trilogy
It’s ok to hate it despise art and even pop art.
Ten minutes into that movie when Leia somehow comes back to in deep space I was ready to walk out of the theatre.
It’s not an ‘overreaction’ to see The Last Jedi as a fundamentally awful film, it’s just the knee-jerk reaction most people I know who have seen it have gotten.
Whether you’re a Star Wars fan or not; ‘The Last Jedi’ is just a clear-as-day not-good film. But when you do actually take the time to analyze it and compare it to the original trilogy; it’s borderline unbelievable just how God-awful it really is.
I also never understood the idea that they hadn’t just kept the same director for the three films. 7/8/9 feels less like a trilogy than a disjointed mess of films imitating far better films.
The first is the political layer on top of the film. Miles is obviously supposed to be Elon - "everyone thinks is genius but is an idiot" and the Twitch guy is supposed to be Joe Rogan who "got banned on Twitch for touting Rhino pills" (referencing the ivermectin that CNN [in which Jake Tapper has a cameo in the film] called a horse dewormer).
Kind of ruined the movie for me because it felt a bit of a collection of character hit pieces.
Another issue is the whole ending seemed poorly written. As the OP mentions it seems weird that Helen/Andi would be left alone with Miles.
Also why wouldn't Miles, with all his wealth and resources not be able to hide how the Mona Lisa was destroyed?
It's not a far leap.
Nevertheless, I have been amused by this movie much more than I assume that most of its viewers have been, because Miles Bron, more than resembling what I know about Elon, had an uncanny resemblance to the CEO of a startup where I have worked some years ago.
The resemblance was complete, in behavior, in speech, in the dyslexic words invented continuously, in the content of the fax messages with product feature suggestions (though my CEO used e-mail, not fax).
So I wonder how many such CEOs exist and whether the script writer has completely made up the Miles Bron character or he has indeed used a real-life CEO as inspiration.
- the first act was not so slow and boring, failing to actually introduce the characters - the finale was not so dumb...
At first I felt a little bored. At the end I was disappointed. Only the middle of the movie was kinda fun.
I watched it twice over the weekend, and the second viewing showed how many details were in plain view the whole time. Which was the central gag of the movie.
Up front, I’ve liked every Johnson film, except for Looper. Not that Looper was poorly crafted, just that I didn’t connect with it.
I thought Last Jedi was the best SW movie since Empire, especially among the sequels, since it had actual things to say. The other two seemed to be more about fan service. Andor is the only other SW media I’ve seen that I’ve enjoyed as much as LJ.
So I’m clearly in Johnson’s audience.
I didn't like it, turns into THE WORSE WRITING EVAH!!
It hits a lot of tropes but in an entertaining way which is surprising. Who'd have thought the audience has time for a met mask wearing antivaxxer.
All the characters looks simple and deplorable but end up being complex and more hateworthy for it!
Who'd have thought audiences even had time for another whodunit? But it proved they did.
That makes it a great movie, and I can't think what I'd recommend anyone as an alternative.
Maybe Bodies, bodies, bodies? But then I truly suggest most should watch both!
> Instead, he used the most basic and lazy trick in the book: withholding information for no good reason whatsoever … With Glass Onion, our main perspective character was performing. And we didn’t know because the movie refused to let us know.
No, the movie is playing with your expectations around genre-typical knowledge gaps.
In classical murder mysteries like the original Knives Out, our knowledge gap is loosely aligned with the protagonist: they arrive at the scene knowing roughly what we know (“there's been a murder”), they outpace us to see through the unreliable witnesses and extend their knowledge gap through brilliant detective work, until the denouement where they explain what was in plain sight all along.
In Glass Onion the knowledge gaps are numerous and they're sliced, layered and reordered:
- There's a large initial knowledge gap between us and Benoit. He is not just ahead of us: he has a 50% head start. This gap slams shut halfway through the movie by backfilling information on how Benoit really came to receive his invitation to the island.
— A new gap opens: the knowledge we now share with Benoit is not yet known to the guests on the island, and we get to enjoy this with him as a reward for the initial “deceit”. From this point we have caught up with the protagonist, at the small cost of our poor reviewer feeling cheated at having interpreted simple unreliable narration as the movie _refusing_ to present the facts to him in tired chronological order.
— Yet another gap opens because for the first time in the film — only halfway through our murder mystery! — we know who was murdered but we don't yet know who murdered them. This presents us with the classical murder mystery knowledge gap that the reviewer wanted to exist from the film's start.
— The writers pepper extra knowledge gaps that provide more unknowns, some of which are new (who “killed” Miles in his murder mystery game?) and others that exist to provide coherence with the original Knives Out. (Who invited Benoit? Is the murderer of all victims the same person?)
> This gets back to something Hitchock [sic] talked about regarding tension. If you watch a scene where two people talk at a restaurant for five minutes then a bomb goes off, it’s boring for 5 minutes and shocking for an instant. If you watch a scene where someone plants a bomb under a table, then two characters show up and talk for five minutes, you’re wondering the entire time if the bomb will go off. It makes the conversation much more dynamic.
Glass Onion achieves far more dynamism than this! The murder-mystery format itself provides the “bomb under the table”: we start from the first minute knowing that a murder will be committed. When halfway through that “bomb” has not gone off yet the dynamic tension is unbearable. It's released with the first bomb's detonation (someone is murdered), only to be replaced immediately by more fizzing fuses (we learn that another is dead, and that the murderer must know there's an imposter).
The article maaaybe identifies one or two minor flaws, but mostly demonstrates that the author didn’t understand the movie. The word “fugue” is not mentioned in the review, for one of the many big misses.
It reads to me like garden variety clickbait of the “Beatles didn’t have a single good song” or “the internet has done no good” variety.
"Bad writing" is not suprising or extreme, just an opinion. And "very good" is subjective — we're talking about movies here, i.e. art. This isn't a review of programming languages where there's an objective reality of pros and cons to consider.
I haven't seen Glass Onion, but I saw Knives Out and while it was a decent film, I think comparing it to the Beatles or the Internet is a bit silly. It sounds like you really enjoyed the film and are just annoyed that someone else didn't.