bad times at the el royale review

SPOILERS AHEAD and inconsistent caps

the movie bad times at the el royale was a bit of an impulsive watch for me- mainly because i hate thrillers/horror movies. if any of the nitpicking i do seems stupid because these are typical problems IN thrillers, please excuse my ignorance because i literally have no experience with the genre at all and i'm criticising from a wanky perspective.

The cast was a really interesting pick - i've never actually watched jeff bridges before, i love cynthia erivo, we all know chris hemsworth, jon hamm i know from Legion. and then dakota johnson being... dakota johnson.
honestly, i dont really know what i expected from the movie mostly because, i've also never previously watched the Drew Goddard's work before/cabin in the woods.

If you've not watched the trailer, make sure you DO NOT watch the trailer before watching the movie - unless you're totally into spoilers in which, that's fine, watch the trailer and maybe check the wiki page out too if you want.
the trailer talks about jeff bridges not being a priest, and also shows you the pervert corridor already, and also all the important people who are otherwise more interesting and suspenseful if you dont know they exist.

the movie opens with a great little montage with nick offerman as felix (the name just reminds me of felix from sense8 and his face every time he was mentioned) - and he buries a bunch of money. i love the way they did this, it establishes where we are without necessarily needing to tell you what's going to happen. the camera mostly never moves for this part, and i found it a really good way to show us that 'static' and stuck kinda claustrophobia voyeurism that underpins most of the movie.

you can break this movie down mostly in two parts - pre Chris and Chris era.
the problem really with the pacing of the movie - is that there are two MAIN plot points that happen in the movie which is only sort of tangentially related - as events that happen in the same night.

firstly - is the introduction of the characters that all come to the same place and check into the hotel.
i honestly wish as a thriller - that they hadn't included chris hemsworth anywhere because you spend a lot of the time waiting for him to show up, when the first part of the film feels equally as ominous - in a way, chris undermines a lot of the movie because of his late but noteworthy appearance -

the introduction of the characters lead to the first 'unsettling' moment - sans the first murder - that jon hamm/ fake name laramie /FBI agent dwight has a secret and he finds all these little recording devices rigged around the room. after that - everything quickly goes downhill - the momentum starts rolling in the movie
he goes down to the main lodge, finds miles miller / lewis pullman heroin'd up, (which by the way, one of the most striking shots in the movie) and he finds all the rooms along a dark corridor - excellent use of lighting and contrast and an eerie absence of music builds this horrible feeling - and he reports back to the government and sabotages everyones car so no one can leave - which is CRUCIAL to the movie's second half.

this whole FBI episode - massive ruse which they actually just use to set the mood and the scenario of the movie- because after the emily/rose sequence and then her shooting him, there's no time they use in pondering his death - he's just dead, and that's about as much grief as he gets because i spent most of the remainder of the movie wondering when the FBI were going to show up - which they never do.

the problem i have with this part is - what happens to the FBI? they clearly know that this has happened and he hasn't returned, but the whole 'political' aspect of the movie is tossed away, what the president has to say about this whole situation is basically irrelevant. the early baits about the president on the TV never come up again, which annoys me because there's clearly sOMETHING going on here, because FBI knows that this is a 'bad' thing that they've got to check out - which is never again talked about after jon hamm's death.
in a way- his secrets died with him, but i'm not sure i appreciated this- because it gave me a lot of questions which i wanted answers to- which the rest of the 1.5 hour time frame doesn't do.

another problem was that regarding the pacing of the movie - they spend a lot of time jumping around chronologically, but also 'thematically'.

they have sections dividing up the film - sort of like a little old vintage place marker to let everyone know at what point of the movie they've currently arrived at - but to be honest most of it comes off as a bit of a failure due to the fact that, you really don't know the characters or are invested in them enough yet to mark them as certain 'rooms' - because you sort of need to associate the place with the person - something that really hasn't happened yet by the time the first 'flashbacks' start happening.
I had no idea of the significance of the 'room 5' or 'room 4' or 'cloakroom' until it was just, places associated with the people - also because these 'rooms' are linked to flashbacks relating to the people... rather than the rooms? if this was a sort of memory like overlapped on the room, i might see it working better, but to me it didn't connect very well.
so while the theme of 'people stuck in places' is a pretty big one in the film, i wish they had focused it more on the people that were there. like, we never even get to see the big pool laramie/jon hamm mentions. ever. we never leave the rooms during the duration of the movie. it feels stagnant - but then why is the pacing and the flashback doing so much jumping around? the contrast here feels confusing, not interesting.


a review from jeremy jahns - he says that the flashbacks hurt the pacing of the movie, and while i don't think this is the main problem with the movie, there is definitely a problem with the way that they've spent a lot of time revisiting the same event (Jon Hamm's death) that it becomes less interesting within the duration of the movie. firstly, jon hamm gets killed and then you go, oh someone else seems to be there. then you wonder - so who's there ?
then you get a revisit of jeff bridges and lewis pullman walking around the hotel peep corridor- and you see them tussling - and THEN you rewind back to cynthia seeing jon hamm unwire everyone's car which is almost back to when the action starts- it gives it a very cyclical feel to the movie's pacing, like there's secrets within secrets - like the hotel itself in all it's janus-esque duality.
If this was a mystery show - i can see this working really well on a TV show format - but in the same movie, spending a good half an hour revisiting the situation does slight the momentum of the 'thriller' - it doesn't become increasingly suspenseful when you don't have to live the paranoia with the characters, but it ended up raising more and more questions - to me it wasn't actually a MAJOR problem regarding the movie, i thought that sort of 'box' framing of the story was interesting, but i do think there is a big clash with the Chris section of the movie which comes off as odd/unmatched which might be why jeremy jahns made the comment - as some people enjoyed this part more - which I think I personally enjoyed as well.

the second part of the movie introduces the MAIN problem - turns out the killings on the TV were enacted by Dakota johnson's sister, who is part of chris hemsworth's crazy cult, and she tells him to come pick her up.
i want to note, at no point do they ever actually explain anything about what the cult does even though emily/dakota is there and he gives a talk and all i gleaned from it was, everyone wants to have sex with chris and that's enough for rosie/rose/the sister, to kill a bunch of people = for his dick. it just doesn't really feel like a well fleshed out aspect of the movie to me.

the part where billy lee/chris is introduced is kind of forgetful to me, because they allow rose/cailee spaeny to have her moment of being shown as 'boots', this part feels disjoined and basically chris hemsworth shows up, does a sexy dance, and basically has his group of followers capture everyone. i've never found dakota johnson a compelling actor so while her and cailee work really well as sort of vapid and very threatening unreadable characters - she seems really weak in this role which sucks because the rest of the cast is just so strong, and she was such an important part of the movie's plot. she spends like 10 minutes - of the movie - interrogating lewis pullman/miles miller and like jon hamm - just gets killed without you ever really feeling sorry for her because she sparked all this in the first place.

cailee- who is a new comer- works really well as rose. there's this sort of manic unreadable chaotic energy that she brings to the role, and her face works really well in this sort of pixie/otherworldly psychotic look in her eyes in the warm fire lighting of the main building that is actually super striking visually, so i really liked that.

anyway -  this part of the movie is basically the 'peak' of the movie, and unfortunately, this drags.
i don't dislike chris hemsworth but the flashbacks drag in moments where you're expecting him to kill all of them - it's a reprieve in a way, like a breather in the mania, a goodbye flashback of emily's life before her eyes, but there's no pay off to knowing his backstory when he comes, because he shows up as a fully fledged cult villain, it's just there to show him in a favorable light, but he's still an awful person.

so he plays roulette - miles is still alive, and then he goes and shoots emily, rose doesn't care, as we know she wouldn't, and all the deaths so far give us no remorse- because there is nothing to endear me to her.
miles however, pleading for his life - is the interesting moment - where he gets this flashback before the MAJOR scene of him sniping away at the cult members - but he's not a mindless awful killer in the hotel, he's a killer in vietnam. for me - i think a lot of emotions were lost on me. if he was a for hire killer and all of the scenes were him being an active murdered, i would have seen that as an interesting PTSD aspect of long term murder - but this feels a bit like 'american sniper' - in the sense that his mom trained him to be really good at shooting, he's gone to war, and killed a ton of innocent people yet we're supposed to feel bad for him, but he's not a for contract hire killer or anything, he was just in the war.
i think the best way to describe it is- the content of his flashback did not make sense to endear me to him at all - and if we hadn't had the flashback of the war and rather replaced it with him in the hotel killing people, it would have been much more relevant and poignant of the cyclical aspects of his death.
the only time we get to mourn a death is miles miller's dying and death, everyone else gets no time for mourning, and i think that was very strange for something that built up the backstories of all the characters involved, to let them go so flippantly.
it feels disrespectful, and i don't think i liked that about the film at all.


Plot wise- the problem i actually had with the movie was the amount of unanswered aspects of the movie that were happening - yes it's interesting to let the audience make up their minds and let suggestively do most of the work - but that's also sort of lazy.
when miles says - i send this to management. i killed them. he's got ALL this data on all these people who are being killed but at no point do management feel the need to intervene, there is literally no one else there to do anything, and we never figure out who the hell management is or what happens to the bodies who get killed - no consequences are ever given in this film
literally nothing ever gets explained, it's all suggested.
how does the FBI know whats happening? who is management? how does miles become employed in this shit hole for being a vietnam vet? how stuck up is rose to let her sister be beat up every night and still be pulled into a cult? why do we care about rose? why is billy lee relevant except for being a villain? what happened to miles? who the hell is that dude on the tape? why is this hotel so awful- more so than any other hotel ?
I left with so much more questions than i started with in the movie, and while there are so many visual moments which gave me this wonderful eerieness, i was more confused as to what exactly was happening.



maybe the problem with this movie is - never do we have enough time to invest in all the characters, nor is there a world building activity that happens for something so place based - neither do we get a consistent and well paced plot ?
with the amount of time in the film - a whopping 2 hours and 20 minutes, we barely ever really know the characters that well. the plot itself is cool (in a way) but who really cares what happens when they're all dead? i was  desensitised to the deaths the minute jon hamm is killed - clearly these people /don't matter'/.
the biggest drive and incentive for me to finish the film was to know what happened to cynthia and jeff and if they got out of it alive- and she was not the first killed off which yeah look fuck you x men origins? darwin evolves to become a god in the comics but NO for the ALL WHITE CAST WE MUST KILL HIM? literally no reason to do that. awful.

The good things i enjoyed - the aesthetics and the visuals  of the movie, very nice. all the scenes were interesting, cinematography was cool and the music pairing was incredible.

also just major appreciation for cynthia being able to flex the singing - all the scenes were sung live and she is actually perfection (if youve never seen her sing, watch every song from the color purple and the live version of the last five years, yes you will thank me.) drew goddard said a crucial part was to find someone who could sing live and i'm really glad they integrated so much of this into the movie - also gives a new benchmark to hiring people WHO CAN ACTUALLY SING thanks.

The acting from cynthia erivo, lewis pullman and jeff bridges was stellar, i really liked their little trio of chaos towards the end. cailee spaeny was perfect for the role as well, and while chris wasn't my FAVORITE, he did a pretty good job at the moments of charisma and cult leadership.

so in the end -  there's a major inconsistency in the movie which leads to a sort of fractured tone, and it leaves the audience just a little bit high and dry on the potential of the film.
i think i enjoyed the movie but i really hated the amount of questions that were left unanswered.
whether or not that is a result of thrillers in general though, leaving more to the imagination, i have no idea because i generally don't watch many.

that being said, i think there were some interesting artistic choices that were made in this movie and i really don't regret watching it - nor did i quit halfway though, which is a lot more than i can say about superman vs batman.
this movie is definitely a movie lover's movie, i don't think it appeals to people who don't love the medium of film, and you really need to read into it to appreciate it a bit more, like the film they used, the jon hamm corridor long take (youtube some interviews!), it's just a beautiful making of a experimental film, and despite my nitpicking, i think it's still a really good movie to experience once.

if i had to give this a rating: 7/10
worth watching once for the performances