Ben X – Film Fest ‘08 Impressions
I went to the grand old Civic Theatre and sat on my arse from 11am to 6pm, watching three movies (with breaks in between, of course). I figure since no one in their right mind would want to see Flight of the Red Balloon and anyone who wants to see Be Kind, Rewind will already have some idea of what it’s like, the first film I review will be Ben X.
Ben X is about a boy called Ben with Asperger’s syndrome (a type of autism). Online, he’s a powerful warrior called Ben X, but in real life he’s a shy, misunderstood bullied teenager, and the film details his struggles.
Personally, while it was ambitious, I thought it failed on a number of levels. There were a few neat factors – most notably the incorporation of the MMORPG ArchLord and it was reasonably competent, but it just wasn’t mindblowing on any level. And I expect mindblowing from my festival films dammit!
So our poor Ben is played by an actor at least 10 years too old. He’s perhaps a bit too effective in his acting his part as a scary loser, because I thoroughly lost sympathy for him partway through and starting hoping the bullies would beat the crap out of him at one point. I guess it doesn’t help that I’m used to watching Asian films, which can be pretty extreme with the bullying scenes (even in comedies like Shaolin Soccer), and comparatively while Ben’s situation sucks, I find it hard to feel sorry for him (though part of that is because I’m just a bitch). Though it was well acted – I was especially taken by the fact that the same nervous tic is repeated by both the actor playing the young Ben and the older ben – and there are other instances of similar attention to detail.
Ben uses way too much internal monologue, because the director also wrote the novel upon which it was based. I had a writing teacher who said that we shouldn’t be afraid to slaughter our sacred cows (those being special, beautiful lines we love and don’t want to get rid of), and this guy really needed that advice. Internal monologues should be saved for bad TV.
The relationship between the guy and the girl kinda pissed me off. Anti-social internet guy winds up with a girlfriend who looks like this:
I really do hate watching movies where the guy gets a girl way too attractive for him. Their relationship overall was poorly depicted. Why would she know his cellphone number but not have his photo after a year? More importantly, why would a guy like that who doesn’t understand normal social interaction find anything attractive in a normal girl? Hell, is she a normal girl? Her personality is far too poorly defined. I feel the movie didn’t establish their relationship at all beyond a cursory conventional romantic thing, so there was a major lack of believability there.
For that matter, his online life wasn’t really defined beyond being “Level 80″ which was a shame, because it’s always quite interesting to see people’s online double lives, especially when contrasted against their real lives. Basically I think the writer was bluffing his way through the entire online aspect of the film (fucking noobs), which means that the main hook of the plot was… toothless (yay mixed metaphors!). The director also doesn’t know when to show and don’t tell, and I saw the ending coming a mile away.
The structure of the film is really disjointed as it’s intercut with “documentary” type interview footage with various characters – all of this is meant to convey some sense of dread, but instead cluttered up the film with largely empty dialogue (”It was only a matter of when.” “It’s sad when kids like this do things like this.” type stuff) and the desired effect could have been achieved more subtly (though it’s possible some parts to make it make more sense were cut during editing, or were from the original novel). But instead all it did was slow the film down at strange points, and could have been cut entirely, I think.
What I did like was the visual linking of the game world to the real world – the HUD would appear, the game mechanics would be mentioned as a metaphor for Ben’s life and so on, but these are applied pretty haphazardly. There’s also a weird Christian element that meshes poorly overall.
Don’t get me wrong though. It wasn’t a terrible film by any means – it was competently done. Just it fell short of the expectations I had of it given its presence in the Film Festival, plus my standards are absurdly high. The old man sitting a few seats down from me walked out, though I think there was an element of generation gap in that. I think to its target audience, it’ll hit its mark no matter what, but personally for me I feel it was lacking.