Don't Like - Overly Serious Dreck
Six or seven years ago I took a screenwriting class at the NW Film Center. It was an intro level course. We got a nice overview on how to write a screenplay and delved a little into things like scene construction. It was an enjoyable class, but the only thing I really remember from it was when our teacher broke down the intro scene of Steven Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark. In this bit of filmmaking 101, we were taught that the most important thing is that the audience doesn’t see Indiana Jones’s face until pretty far into the first scene for dramatic effect. You see a lot of other people react and do things, but you don’t see the main character. It was a neat little detail, though hardly the most memorable thing about the movie. I thought about that lesson for a little and then forgot all about it until watching Robert Eggers’s Nosferatu. This movie is very serious, or at least it wants to be. It has lots of long slowly paced shots, tense acting, muffled dialogue, and an impossibly gray aesthetic.1 It desperately is hoping to be a serious heir to the famous 1922 original.2 But, in doing so, it goes way overboard to the point of becoming self-parody. This is on full display when we meet Count Orlok, as Eggers does everything in his power to not show his face.3 This doesn’t just happen for a small part of the intro. No, it goes on and on and on with endless pans, dimly lit rooms, and obscured frames to keep his haunting visage from view. At first it’s intriguing and then it becomes a game of visual keep away that Eggers keeps up well past the point of being interesting. Why he does this is beyond me. F.W. Murnau had no such compunction of showing Count Orlok’s face in the original. And so, the whole time I was watching this part of the movie I couldn’t help but think back to my class and imagine someone taking away all the wrong lessons of what makes movies good or interesting. Unfortunately, there are a great many people who will be copying Eggers’s notes.
It is decidedly not a new fangled vampire story a la Blade, From Dusk Til Dawn, or—gasp— Twilight.
Ironically, this movie already exists because Werner Herzog made a great Nosferatu in 1979 with Klaus Kinski as Count Orlok. But whatever, people can make whatever movie they want, you know?
Count Orlok also for some reason sounds like a mix of Bela Lugosi and Christian Bale’s Batman, which doesn’t help anything here.
here here!