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For a thriller movie its good to make sure the viewer doesn’t exactly know where you’re gonna go next. This movie does that fine, but I felt like it kind of left behind the opening premise of the movie in the process. Did the first half of the movie really matter plot wise? It matters for the characters of course, but it feels like an afterthought. This could be intentional, with the movie using it to say that the character doesn’t care about what happened anymore, but like… that’s too wasteful.

Its a Park Chan-wook movie so of course its got good editing, cinematography, the whole 27 feet.

Absurdly violent with real animal cruelty. Its no wonder this got banned and had to be recut. But after stomaching that, the movie will go from the quality you’d expect from a Hong Kong New Wave film, to bordering on b-movie level plot intermittently. It was pretty succinct with its messaging, but then it did a “ok we’re going to repeat that just to make sure you understand what we’re saying” kind of ending, which was a little annoying.

I usually get some ice cream at the half-way point in a movie, but after the first 10 minutes I decided not to. I’m glad I did.

Pretty drawn out and slow. There were lots of scenes that really dragged. The fight scenes were just OK for 1970, but the last one was good.

For a wuxia movie you’ve gotta have people jumping really high. This movie solves that problem by cutting to a performer doing flips off the ground. But it was done in a very drastic way that didn’t feel like it had much lead-up.

I remember seeing reviews for this movie that described it as ‘dreamy’. Which, like… huh? To me something being dreamy is when characters in a story just go along with whatever is happening to them, regardless if it makes sense. Which doesn’t happen at all. Aesthetically this also didn’t feel very ‘dreamy’ either. It doesn’t help that this is a /very/ common descriptor for movies, to the point of being overused. Maybe other peoples dreams are just really boring.

I might’ve liked the movie more if I learned more about Buddhism, which this movie clearly has lots of themes of.

Each film feels pretty disconnected from one a other. This maybe makes sense considering how it would’ve been been when it released. Like maybe it was meant to be a shotgun blast of different animation for eager theater goers, with as much range as possible.

Labyrinth was easily the best, presenting all of its interesting ideas very plainly and clearly

Running Man felt like an excuse to have cool car exploding stuff

Cancellation order had a very “you’re ending it there?” kind of ending