Reviews

"Shinobi" is one of those movies that thinks the mere act of killing off a character automatically brings a sense of gravitas or emotion to the story. Unfortunately, for the audience to actually care about the people dying, you have to develop the characters, otherwise all you have is a bunch of random acts of violence. The problem is especially compounded when you have TONS of characters, all of whom die.

OK, so if you can't be bothered to make the characters memorable or sympathetic in any way, you can at least make the REASONS for why they die plausible, right? Nope. Here we have a war between two ninja clans, with neither side really knowing WHY they are fighting each other. They kill each other because the emperor says so. Yet even well after it becomes glaringly obvious that the emperor wants ALL of them dead, they still refuse to abandon their meaningless missions. That's not stubbornness... that's just plain dumb.

Fine, fine! There is no character development, and the plot provides no reasonable rationale for fighting. At least they die fighting in cool action scenes, right? Yet again, NO! In fact, many of the fights aren't even fights at all: super ninjas that the movie spent so much time and effort introducing die suddenly (and lamely, in my opinion). I'm talking about things like, "Lalala, I'm walking along and I- *neck gets slashed*." THE END for that character. Not even halfway through the film, I threw my hands up in frustration at the ludicrousness of it.

There are a lot of comments regarding the controversy surrounding whether this movie got the facts straight or not. Frankly, I didn't care one way or another about the events in the movie, because the filmmakers did not MAKE me care. When making a documentary, the number one priority is to have a cohesive plot line that draws the audience into the story. With this, "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" fails in every respect.

Every scene should have a purpose, to develop the characters in the documentary, or to further the story with background information. Here, all we see is a confused mish-mash of poorly chosen footage. We have political figures, who we don't know and don't care about because the film never develops them, rambling on and on about logistical stuff with no context. Think C-SPAN mixed with your neighbor's home videos. Ohhhh, very exciting! We have random people off the street screaming stuff into the camera, again not adding anything to the story. Throughout the entire movie I kept wondering, "Why are you showing me this scene?", and the only possible explanation was that the filmmakers were incompetent.

Even the supposed main draw of the movie, the "behind-the-scenes" footage of the coup and aftermath, is mind-numbingly boring. Nothing exciting happens on camera. All you see is meetings, more meetings, and even more meetings. Oh, and throw in a bunch of shots of shrill protesters. Just because you were there and got it on film doesn't automatically make something interesting. In fact, the only footage worth seeing in the entire movie was the brief "sniper" scene during the riot. 10 exciting minutes out of 75, not a very good ratio.

Everything goes terribly wrong in this steaming pile of garbage. I could hardly believe this was by the same director of "The Emperor and the Assassin".

The CGI was awful. The palace looked like it was from an 80's movie like "Tron". The running scenes looked like a car driving scene from the 50's where you have a glaringly obvious fake background in the rear window.

The editing was horrible as well. Jump-cuts have a certain role in the visual language of movies, whether indicating frantic behavior (the elevator scene in "Revolver"), showing something happening over time (somebody waiting in a room), or even cutting to the beat of the music (the intro to "Scratch", the intro to "Boiler Room"). There are so many places in "The Promise" where jump cuts are thrown in for no rhyme or reason. People are talking, and then all of the sudden it cuts, and cuts, and cuts in the middle of their dialogue, like someone keeps accidentally hitting the fast-forward button. It's almost like the crew didn't get enough film coverage, decided to get sloppy in the editing room, and said, "Eh, they won't notice." Well, I sure noticed, and it was so disorienting I felt like vomiting. Even Michael "ADHD" Bay's movies have better editing than this.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, I have never seen so many fade-cuts in one movie in my life. Practically every scene faded to black after 30 seconds, like the movie was a compilation of TV commercials or something. This totally killed any kind of flow the movie hadn't already destroyed.

Finally, many other comments have indicated the frustratingly illogical script. People do stupid things for no reason at all. I'm not even talking about movie logic, where you can temporarily suspend your belief. "Why is the girl running up the stairs instead of out the front door to get away from the killer?" OK, so that's typical movie logic, which you can easily explain away with "Well, she is terrified so she doesn't immediately think of that particular escape route. Anyway, the killer is chasing her up the stairs, so it makes sense." In "The Promise", you have things like an army sending several hundred slaves into a canyon to get trampled to death by buffaloes. Why? Does having them get trampled somehow help the army? Does it give them some sort of tactical advantage? No. In fact, why would the enemy even send buffaloes through a canyon in the first place when the entire good guys army is safely positioned on the ridges of the mountain? The answer, of course, is that the director said "Hey, know what would be cool?! A scene with stampeding buffaloes trampling people to death! YEAH!!" Then there are scenes over and over again where someone says, "OK you can go now. WAIT! You cannot go. OK, you can go now. WAIT! You cannot go. OK, you can go now..." I can safely say that best part of "The Promise" is when the credits roll, because you know it is finally over.