Influence (2015) User Reviews (2)

Strained loftiness

[dziolchazeslunska · 3/10 · 13 December 2015]

From the beginning of the movie I feel as if I came to class late and the teacher is trying to fill me in quickly on what is the problem that we're going to be busying ourselves with today. As a viewer I wasn't allowed a chance to get roped into the story, the story was presented to me.

The idea of the movie is somehow brilliant, yet the actual piece is far from gripping. I can't imagine any non-Pole mustering any interest in the story. You get the feeling that the author's dream was to make a movie that made use of this type of surreal imagery and only then whipped up this flat plot to give the movie an excuse to exist.

Talking about imagery, as much as I enjoyed the slightly cartoonish visual effects that played well into the movie's premise, the one effect that deserves to be bashed here is the mirror trick (from 'Contact' 1997)used not once but twice within the first 15 minutes. OK, we get it, it's a great effect, no need to rub it in our faces though. Additionally the camera work is off, at times it's too realistic for such an (aspiring to be) surreal movie. In some scenes the viewer becomes painfully aware of the cameraman's existence which kills the already faint interest.

But the final nail to this pseudo artistic coffin is the theatrical acting. Deliberate.

On plus side, the wardrobe and art department did a great job.

'Hiszpanka' is one of those movies where it's easy to accuse the unconvinced audiences of ignorance. Yet I'll insist that a movie cannot stand on intertextuality alone. It should be a mere cherry on top. It's obvious what the movie was aiming at, It's also obvious that it missed.

Very bad very, bad bad movie

[PogoNeo · 2/10 · 18 February 2016]

This movie is as bad as the ungrammatical summary title of this review of it: very bad very, bad bad. Or to be completely honest, it is even worst: because it is not "bad", but just plain wrong

The script is poor. The director is not directing. Most of the actors are not acting. The editing and characteristic visual effects are simply annoying. The only surely noticeable thing is the soundscape of music- in that it is extremely boring. And on top of that there is no historic background / setting, so the historically uneducated viewers will think of this as a pure fantasy story, instead of historic events told in a merely fantasy way

All this picture is, is nothing more than just a bunch of boring and sometimes chaotic scenes revolving around the re-birth of polish state near the end of the First World War. In it we have multiple ripoffs from other movies presented in such a manner, that they constitute as a pure kitsch. For example at the beginning we are (not as much presented but) bluntly attacked by a character being a laughable mix of Dr. Strangelove and Darth Vader; but the sad thing is, that this laughable part was most likely not intended to be as such

The only subjectively valuable thing was the statement given by one of the characters, who happened to say that he wants the independent Poland to be a country where white and red means strawberries with smetana (a type of sour cream) and not the spilled blood of polish people of high moral values (the red and the white are the two colors equally distributed on polish flag). And the only objectively valuable aspect of this movie are the sets and costumes, which recreate the time period accurately and on a big scale. But even this positive effect of accuracy had to be destroyed, by things like the usage of word Luftwaffe when talking about German planes (because Luftwaffe is the German air force from the Second World War, the conflict that will take place two decades after events from this movie)

And so you have been warned: do not waste time on this attempt on making a piece of art. Because what came to be of it, really do is a piece: but of s**t