Welcome back to The Blog Complainer.com where weird and kooky stuff happens every once in a while, like me going out of my way to review a movie that came from a streaming service. We’re entering uncharted territory folks.
That’s a lie. I have talked about a few in the past but I don’t review them often because I normally need to motivate myself into watching them. Say what you like about cinemas, but when I see a movie that I think might be worth watching I will go out there with the sole intent to see that particular movie, but with streaming there are so many options that I easily get distracted and watch something super old instead of whatever is hip or relevant. You could call that being plain old lazy, but I just call it my weird in the moment thought process.
Anyway, I saw some good reviews on Letterboxd for this movie and it convinced me to drop in my two cents on the topic. The Vast of Night is an interesting title for a Sci-Fi movie because it sounds weird to say out loud let alone weird to think about why do they even have such a peculiar title?
The Vast of Night is an indie Sci-Fi movie on Amazon Prime and it’s a directorial debut for Andrew Patterson. The story takes place in a small American town in the 1950’s and is about two teens who slowly make the shocking discovery that there is some weird radio frequencies coming from the sky and people may or may not have been taken up into the sky to never be seen again.
As a huge appreciator of the Sci-Fi genre I commend this movie for being the most unique I have seen in a while. I love the ideas this movie presents of young kids up against something so big they can’t even comprehend what they’re dealing with. It all focuses around the fear of the unknown, which is great for a movie like this. However, if that’s pretty much all we’re working with then I’m kind of guaranteed to lose interest.
Look, this a pretty solid movie, the two lead actors are good and the camera work is top notch, it’s a nice looking movie, but too bad it’s a real drag. The Vast of Night is an ambitious movie. It reminded me a lot of another Sci-fi film, Annihilation, which was probably even more ambitious. The movie leaves a lot to the imagination, which is fine, but the movie didn’t leave enough of an impact for me to even care.
It was a bit pretentious with really long drawn out scenes with the characters slowly but surely coming to the conclusion that there is some weird shit in the sky that abducts people to never be seen again. Yeah, I say scenes as it takes the teens a few gos to learn different sides of the same story and with no real new information to keep you interested. I got pretty annoyed after a while and basically wrote off the ending as a real disappoint.
I’m not writing this movie off entirely as I will always remember it as interesting one off experience. I liked it enough to give it a 7/10 and if you want to check this out for yourself it’s available on Amazon Prime. I have been The Blog Complainer and I’ll be back after I’m done being probed by some mysterious aliens.
