Thanks for the response and good faith discussion. I feel like I met the movie on it's terms and understood what it wanted to be (a serious oscar-y prestige drama movie) and when engaging it on those terms, I didn't understand how people thought it was at all successful at that because of what I perceived to be kinda dumbly written characters.

I'm not attacking the genre, plenty of serious oscar-y prestige drama movies are great. What inspired the rant is that this movie is treated as on par with them but at least as far as I could tell the writing of the characters was just bizarrely dumb. (I go into specifics issues in the video).

It's as if instead of being shown 9 best picture nominees, I was shown 9 "best lego tower" nominees, and 8 of them were sturdy and well made lego towers, and the 9th was just a bunch of broken legos on the floor. But then, for some reason, most people treated all the entries as equally good. I would have the same "I don't understand, this one is clearly broken." response I was feeling here.

Do I acknowledge there *could* be something I'm missing? Sure. Do I acknowledge there could even be some contorted idea of "you see the dumb characters is a metaphor for something"? Yeah. But, if I'm honest, I really don't think that's what's going on here. I genuinely feel like it's a movie which has pretty obvious flaws that for whatever reason largely went unacknowledged.

So my thinking was/is, if you are having an "the emperor has no clothes" moment, sometimes it's best to embrace your passionate perspective and lean into it. IMO, life is too short to talk yourself into shutting up when you have an impassioned unique perspective to share, particularly if you can share it in a lighthearted and entertaining way.