Review: 'The East'

I was looking forward to seeing this film. Now, having finally seen it, I'm not so sure if I really saw it. Despite there being decent, even good, performances, the movie suffers heavily from a very uneven screenplay.

I don't know if I just didn't understand the subject material that was being dealt with in the movie, or if I just didn't really care all that much about what happened. This whole thing was just convoluted. So many detours and intricacies are taken in this story to a point where it's pretty much just pretentious. Brit Marling, who I've admired in the past with her much better film of which she wrote and starred in ('After Earth'), this time around has left a disappointing mark.

After an hour or so once the movie had ended, I found myself having little to no decent memory of what this movie did to me intellectually. In the moment, as the film was playing, I tried to understand what most of these ideas the film was trying to get across. Maybe I'm just thinking harder than I should, admittedly. 

The revolutionary group, known as the East, are all about giving large pharmaceutical companies a 'taste of their own medicine' and fighting fire with fire. There were times, particularly in the middle of the film, where I did begin feeling a bit of emotion for what the main characters were trying to accomplish, with a subplot involving a poisoned water-supply. But near the end of that act, yet again, the subtly of the situation and the message the movie is trying to portray goes into overdrive, trying to bash the message quite literally over your head. The juxtaposition is just a little too over the top.

Characters are introduced, and then they just disappear. Plot devices are set up, but never referred to again. Most of the characters are forgettable, and I just could not find any clear focus in the story.

I'm pretty sure the subtext of this movie was really, in a way, about civil rights and equality. I'm perfectly fine with that, but instead of keeping it ambiguous and up to interpretation for the audience, they just turn it into a show-and-tell of individuals who, at one time or another, have been shunned by society in world history; like the african-american, the fat person, the gay person, the deaf person, the mentally challenged, etc.

The film has good intentions, but it feels like it's trying to say something deep, when it's really nothing we haven't heard before and don't need to be reminded of.

My rating: 2 / 4