Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery – Bad Writing

I think there are a few hints - for example, the mythical Cassandra and Helen were also (non-mutual) twins, and putting a "Cassandra" and "Helen" on a Greek island (and maybe also in some sense "Paris") you're definitely being primed to think in that direction. I would need to watch it again to see if there's something more blatant as she shows up.

My nitpick is that Peg felt mostly extraneous - the main plot beat conversation with Peg could've been a conversation with Birdie directly. (And Derol is already present as the extraneous-for-the-sake-of-it element.)

> Mary Poppins Princess Leia

It's funny that the one single time on the entire series when things loose in deep space behave like if they weren't falling somewhere is the one people keep complaining about.

Anyway, the last 3 movies has a really great storyline that was completely destroyed by any other aspect you can pick. So the things people choose to complain are quite arbitrary. But this one is funny.

Reading the piece it seems like the author is upset they weren’t able to guess the suspect, and blamed the movie for it.

I watched it twice over the weekend, and the second viewing showed how many details were in plain view the whole time. Which was the central gag of the movie.

Up front, I’ve liked every Johnson film, except for Looper. Not that Looper was poorly crafted, just that I didn’t connect with it.

I thought Last Jedi was the best SW movie since Empire, especially among the sequels, since it had actual things to say. The other two seemed to be more about fan service. Andor is the only other SW media I’ve seen that I’ve enjoyed as much as LJ.

So I’m clearly in Johnson’s audience.

Oh; wow, worst example ever.

Ten minutes into that movie when Leia somehow comes back to in deep space I was ready to walk out of the theatre.

It’s not an ‘overreaction’ to see The Last Jedi as a fundamentally awful film, it’s just the knee-jerk reaction most people I know who have seen it have gotten.

Whether you’re a Star Wars fan or not; ‘The Last Jedi’ is just a clear-as-day not-good film. But when you do actually take the time to analyze it and compare it to the original trilogy; it’s borderline unbelievable just how God-awful it really is.

I also never understood the idea that they hadn’t just kept the same director for the three films. 7/8/9 feels less like a trilogy than a disjointed mess of films imitating far better films.

I found Glass Onion's writing far from “lazy”.

> Instead, he used the most basic and lazy trick in the book: withholding information for no good reason whatsoever … With Glass Onion, our main perspective character was performing. And we didn’t know because the movie refused to let us know.

No, the movie is playing with your expectations around genre-typical knowledge gaps.

In classical murder mysteries like the original Knives Out, our knowledge gap is loosely aligned with the protagonist: they arrive at the scene knowing roughly what we know (“there's been a murder”), they outpace us to see through the unreliable witnesses and extend their knowledge gap through brilliant detective work, until the denouement where they explain what was in plain sight all along.

In Glass Onion the knowledge gaps are numerous and they're sliced, layered and reordered:

- There's a large initial knowledge gap between us and Benoit. He is not just ahead of us: he has a 50% head start. This gap slams shut halfway through the movie by backfilling information on how Benoit really came to receive his invitation to the island.

— A new gap opens: the knowledge we now share with Benoit is not yet known to the guests on the island, and we get to enjoy this with him as a reward for the initial “deceit”. From this point we have caught up with the protagonist, at the small cost of our poor reviewer feeling cheated at having interpreted simple unreliable narration as the movie _refusing_ to present the facts to him in tired chronological order.

— Yet another gap opens because for the first time in the film — only halfway through our murder mystery! — we know who was murdered but we don't yet know who murdered them. This presents us with the classical murder mystery knowledge gap that the reviewer wanted to exist from the film's start.

— The writers pepper extra knowledge gaps that provide more unknowns, some of which are new (who “killed” Miles in his murder mystery game?) and others that exist to provide coherence with the original Knives Out. (Who invited Benoit? Is the murderer of all victims the same person?)

> This gets back to something Hitchock [sic] talked about regarding tension. If you watch a scene where two people talk at a restaurant for five minutes then a bomb goes off, it’s boring for 5 minutes and shocking for an instant. If you watch a scene where someone plants a bomb under a table, then two characters show up and talk for five minutes, you’re wondering the entire time if the bomb will go off. It makes the conversation much more dynamic.

Glass Onion achieves far more dynamism than this! The murder-mystery format itself provides the “bomb under the table”: we start from the first minute knowing that a murder will be committed. When halfway through that “bomb” has not gone off yet the dynamic tension is unbearable. It's released with the first bomb's detonation (someone is murdered), only to be replaced immediately by more fizzing fuses (we learn that another is dead, and that the murderer must know there's an imposter).