Howdy. Long time no see. It’s been a while since the last post on this blog because it was a mistake to start in the middle of the semester. That being said hopefully posts will start to come in more frequently now that school is winding down. Well, they will from me, I don’t know about the other ones. Anyway let’s talk about the movie.
I recently watched The Invisible Man for the first time. Yeah the movie that came out in February 2020 and I finally watched it for the first time 14 months later. I never got around to seeing it when it first came out because you know, pandemic, but I finally got around to watching it because it was leaving HBO Max at the end of the month.
I know a lot of people were talking about how good it was when it first came out but after watching it, I can safely say that it was just alright. It wasn’t bad by any stretch of the imagination. I don’t know if it was because I was watching it on my couch and not getting the full theater experience or because it has been out for so long, but the twists and turns didn’t make me feel anything.
Top to bottom this movie is pretty good. Good acting, good writing, good suspense, you name it. It also has a good antagonist, something that I love to see in movies. It has one of those antagonists that I couldn’t wait to see die, which is so crazy because he maybe has 10 lines in the entire movie. However at the end when he got his comeuppance I was like “oh yeah that’s cool too.”
I think the reason the ending does nothing for me is the idea that nothing was truly confirmed. Adrian (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) was a bad person, there’s no way around that. Everyone hated that dude and I did too even though he is not prominently featured in the movie. There’s a lot of things that happen that make you believe Adrian is the one behind the mask. His phone was in the attic, the bottle of diazepam she dropped magically appeared in her bathroom, and a bunch of dialogue clues such as Adrian being a leader in the field of optics as well as the word “surprise.” However when the big unmasking scene happens, his brother Tom (Michael Dorman) is the one under the mask, and it turns out that Tom had been the “mastermind” behind everything. Yeah, right.
It all comes to a head when Cecilia (Elizabeth Moss) kills Adrian over dinner wearing his spare suit. That is such a gas concept but once she found the second suit earlier in the movie, I guessed it was heading there. Like I said in the previous paragraph, I hated the fact that nothing was confirmed. When Cecilia kills Adrian, she was wearing a wire, hoping to catch him in the act. Although she wasn’t trying to catch him. She just wanted to get him alone so she could kill him. I was hoping that he would slip up and say something a little more incriminating.
The ending I would’ve written is honestly a little cartoonish, but I think it still works. Also it would’ve been a callback to earlier in the film. My ending would’ve gone like this: Cecilia baits Adrian into spilling the beans, Adrian gets arrested. While awaiting trial, guards find Adrian dead in his cell. He “killed himself.” It would then cut to Cecilia finding out and feigning shock/surprise before hanging up the phone and going about her day.
I just think that would’ve been a better ending. I don’t know why but not 100% confirming that he was the one pulling all the strings kind of bothered me. Maybe I’m just an idiot that needs my plot twists spelled out for me, but the ending to this movie was not the cathartic experience it was made out to be.
Above and Beyond the Screen 