___ Wight

I get that the movie had a point and message to get across but when the priority became just pushing the point and only that, it kind of made the writing suffer because almost all the characters besides Paul started only acting in the way that would get across the message best, whether they would really react like that stopped being important because it just had to be as didactic as possible. I get that people act irrational all the time in real life, and the situation in the movie hasn't ever happened so we can't check and see how people would really react, but it just started becoming really obvious that all that mattered was The Point. There were some times where the responses were fairly believable but for a lot of it it was just pushed too far. Also, if his kids hated him a bit less it would really make a lot of this more of a gut punch emotionally as things got worse. But that would go against the big commentary I guess. You have to make sure every single person is there to illustrate societal ills I guess, so if you show young people you have to show The Problem With The Youth. Paul was genuinely pretty well thought out as a character and reacted to situations realistically but I wish other characters also got to be more human too. I get that everyone has a message they think is important but sometimes it can get in the way of a really compelling story. If it was a short episode of an anthology series or something, it being didactic wouldn't be a huge issue but if it's going to be a whole film you want some more meat. If you look at a lot of positive reviews, there are people basically using it to just prop up whatever views they already had, you'll see someone ranting about how it proves all men are evil and you'll see another person ranting about how it's this biting commentary on woke culture and they somehow tie it into ranting about trans people despite trans people never even being mentioned in the movie, because they're grasping onto whatever they see as patting them on the back for their beliefs but I don't really want to see a movie that soley exists just to rile people up about a hot button issue. These stupid people aren't really the movie's fault but it feels like if that's what they got out of it maybe there's not a lot there. There were some great things about the movie but it just all becomes about The Message to the point of stupidity. A movie can have a message and deliver it in a way that doesn't totally talk down to the audience.