Ben Affleck and Matt Damon’s newest action thriller could’ve been great, but the hellish Netflix production requirements keep it merely at “just okay”. Who is really to blame?
Historically speaking, January has never been a good time for movies. Theater attendance is usually at a massive low, giving studios the perfect opportunity to “dump” their hot garbage movies at a time where there’s virtually zero competition, reaping the benefits of the handful of movie-goers that still turn up during the slow season. Audiences have even coined the term “Dump-uary” to drive home just how abysmal month one of the new year is in the world of film.
However, with streaming taking over, and all but killing the theater industry as a whole, January no longer has to be reserved for the worst of the worst in terms of quality. The majority of the public does their movie watching from home year round, thus rendering the need to curate the quality or scope of films around certain demographics and the times they will most likely be visiting a movie theater more and more irrelevant. If you’re still following, this theory proposes the idea that we should be getting even more quality films and getting them all year long, ya know, because of the wonderful world of streaming. And here comes Netflix, and possibly other streaming giants before long, who are determined to shit all over that dream and assure that piss-poor quality is no longer reserved for only the slow months, but all year, every year, for the foreseeable future. The reason? They blame audiences. The sad realization? They might not be wrong.
Before I continue working out my existential crisis, let’s dive into The Rip.
The story follows a team of Miami cops who specialize in drug house seizures, or “rips”. After their captain is killed, and amid rumors of dirty officers stealing money from the raids, they find themselves at the forefront of an internal investigation. In the midst of the heated interrogations, the second-in-command Lieutenant receives an anonymous tip that sends him and is crew to a drug house in Hialeah, stumbling upon an amount of money that none of them have ever seen before. As it becomes clear that outsiders are aware of the raid, the team starts to suspect that one of them is dirty and out to steal the money.
This has all the ingredients for a solid cop action/thriller. How could it go wrong? The answer is simple; too much exposition.
The film opens with the murder of the team’s captain and quickly cuts to a fast-paced montage of the crew being separately interrogated by Internal Affairs regarding the incident. It is here that I started getting the feeling that I was going to be annoyed by the script. On the surface, it’s cops being questioned. But what’s really going on is endless plot exposition that is flat out telling us what lead us here, and where we will be heading in the not-too-distant future. One of my biggest pet peeves in film is the distrust of the audience to figure out what is going on through context clues and turning to endless verbal explanation to guide us through the experience. And it doesn’t stop in the first act. No. This continues throughout the rest of the movie and culminates in the final “twist”, which literally has multiple characters flat out telling us what the twist is and how it happened. It’s almost as if they were catering to an audience that might not actually be paying attention to the movie. But why would anyone put on a movie and not watch it?
Matt Damon and Ben Affleck were guests on the “Joe Rogan Experience” after the movie was released. Here’s the quote that has been making the rounds on the internet and helped give me that gentle push into crisis mode:
“The standard way to make an action movie that we learned was, you usually have three set pieces. One in the first act, one in the second, one in the third,” Damon explained. “You spend most of your money on that one in the third act. That’s your finale. And now they’re like, ‘Can we get a big one in the first five minutes? We want people to stay. And it wouldn’t be terrible if you reiterated the plot three or four times in the dialogue because people are on their phones while they’re watching.
I’ve heard rumblings over the years of streaming companies, mostly Netflix, tailoring their content (they’re not movies or shows anymore, now it’s “content” – a rant for another day) to fit the criteria of what is now being referred to as the “second screen experience”. Through data collection, the powers that be have stumbled upon a trend that was never really that hard to notice; general audiences are seriously addicted to their phones and will most likely be glued to them while they watch TV. If we lived in normal times, there’s a good chance that the execs would just say “Tough shit. Looks like they won’t know what’s going on in the movie”. That is the proper response. However, we live in improper times now and the execs have decided that the more bountifully profitable path is the one where they cater to the lowest common denominator.
What starts to make the waters truly murky is the public’s response to Damon’s reveal. There are plenty of people who share my sense of dread that this is the death knell of the arts as we know it. As depressing as it is, the silver lining is that I know I’m not alone and screaming into the void. However, there are even more people who are impartial, stating that it’s just a change of the times and trends. The worst responses though, the ones that were, are currently, and will continue to be responsible for this bastardization of the arts, are the ones who openly admit to being the target audience for the second screen experience. Furthermore, they are actively challenging Netflix and other studios, stating that if they made more engaging content that was worth putting the phone down for, they would willingly curb their phone addiction for the time being. Now the conundrum has veered into classic “chicken or the egg came first” territory. Is Netflix curating their content to appeal to the second screen audience? Or are audiences turning to second screen viewing in response to said content?
While I would like to believe that Netflix shot first, and that the second screen experience is purely in response to their dumbing down of scripts as a woeful misjudgment of what general audiences really want, I just can’t bring myself to believe that to be true. I don’t spend a ton of time on social media, but the amount I have spent is enough for me to know that it was the public who asked for this, maybe even unknowingly.
The concept of people consuming the most popular movies and/or TV shows for the sole purpose of being able to talk about them afterward is nothing new. Back then, it was called “water cooler talk”, and anyone over the age of 25 should understand that term. It refers to a time when people would watch the latest big thing so that they could join in the conversation where the majority of workplace chit-chat went down; the office water cooler. Since the internet boom, the water cooler has been replaced with social media where there is no limit to when or how many people can join in at a time. Not only that, but where audiences, once upon a time, actually had to sit down and watch the movie or show in order to form an opinion and be able to hang at the water cooler, the internet has made it possible to bypass the entire “watching” segment of the process. It has become more common for amateur viewers, or “content creators”, to watch a piece of media and immediately take to YouTube or TikTok to post a video condensing all of the important information, such as plot and symbolism, into the shortest amount of time possible. It’s like being able to read the cliff notes in less than 10 minutes. Because of this, people feel less inclined to actually watch the movie or show anymore, knowing that they can get all the information they need to keep up with the Joneses in just a few quick taps of their phone screen.
This new phenomenon has since succeeded in “cutting out the middle man”, so to speak. What it has revealed is that the public is now, and possibly always was, more interested in being able to merely say that they’ve seen the popular thing than they were in actually seeing it. Hell, I’ve read posts on places like Reddit where someone will be giving their review on a film as they are still watching it, proving that experiencing the art was never top priority. It was always about the engagement with others afterwards. Even a site like Letterboxd, which is a social media platform specifically for cinephiles, has become more about having the most amount of films logged on your watch list, how many people follow your profile, and who can write the wittiest one-liner review, instead of being a place where people from any background, age, or country can come to discover and discuss their mutual love of film.
With all of this in mind, the question begs to be repeated; is the downfall of media literacy the fault of Netflix and other studios? Or are they just responding to what the public has consciously and/or subconsciously been demanding for decades?
And with that, I’m going to go watch a movie to try and forget the question and it’s more-than-likely grim answer. Oh, and I’m going to leave my phone in the other room. I suggest you do the same.
Jon the Critic 