Link: The Wall
Summary: A woman finds herself trapped in a valley by an invisible wall.
Thoughts: I’ve seen some pretty terrible and boring films this year, but this film managed to find new depths of inanity I did not know were possible. After finding the wall, the main character quickly realizes she will have to live off the land all by herself, which she is fortunately very proficient at (unlike Tom Hanks in Cast Away, who actually has to figure things out). She doesn’t explore the strange phenomenon of the invisible wall all that much, other than feeling it with her hands and then deciding to smash her car into it (she may know how to grow crops and hunt, but she’s also stupid). The entire film then consists of images of her surviving on her own while she narrates, trying to wax philosophical and romantic about her relationship with the world and the human condition, with the philosophical depth of a fourth grader. Her thoughts include ideas like: “I think mankind is the only creature for which right and wrong exist.” “Maybe humans are the most pitiable creatures because we have enough intelligence to try to resist the natural order.” “Does time move, or do we move through time?” These may be interesting philosophical subjects in and of themselves, but if I were interested in pondering these things, I’d read a book by a philosopher who thought about these things in some depth. I watch films for a subtler sort of introspection. When it’s just a narrator mentioning these things in passing while I watch her character walk across a landscape doing nothing, what’s the point? In the end (spoiler alert), she never escapes or finds out anything about the mysterious wall. She just says something she thinks is poetic and looks out a window, hoping viewers will give her credit for being so contemplative.