Oooo boy. Still processing, but Dr. Sleep pressed all the wrong buttons. Pretty sure it’s objectively worse than the Shining TV miniseries. At best, nobody will remember this in two months. Critics really missed the mark on this one, similar to Death Stranding. Why are critics wrong so often lately? Aren’t most critics liberal? Makes you wonder—if you can’t trust their reviews, can you really consider their political positions valid? Huh? HUH
Still, it’s not all bad. Here are my bullet points:
* First half hour was a little sloppy, but it seemed promising. It had potential; I was a little hyped, actually.
* The doubles they used for Danny and Shelley Duvall were abysmal. They looked terrible (a double is no longer good enough in the year of de-aging, but even by the standards of using doubles, these were really poor matches). More importantly, they acted -nothing- like Danny and Shelley in The Shining. These are two very famous performances, and neither are that complex. Just bad, bad, bad. If they couldn’t have done these scenes right, they shouldn’t have done them at all...
* ...but then there wouldn’t be much connecting this to the Shining. This movie is really its own thing. If you walk in thinking this isn’t a sequel to the Shining, you may like it. But it will remind you it’s a sequel to the Shining frequently, even though the plot is disconnected.
* The new little girl is a bad actor and has no personality. She delivers all of her lines like they’re the moral of an after-school special. She is not charming or likable or dislikable or anything. She’s just there—and since she’s a lead that’s a big problem. Can’t feel or care about a block of wood.
* Rose and Crow were pretty cool. I could’ve used more of them and the baddies in general. Their introduction was handled really shittily, but they end up being the fun part of the movie.
* This fucker feels long. It’s very slow paced. The plot is very simple, but it wasn’t planned out in advance and it meanders and meanders. It’s a simple plot but it would take me three fucking paragraphs to describe it because either King or the script writer thought they were brilliant and dumped all over the fucking place.
* Terrible, generic movie soundtrack, ca 2019. Not good for a genre flick. Not at all acceptable for a sequel to a fuckin’ Kubrick flick. They use a few Wendy Carlos music cues from the original and a -horrendous- orchestrated version of her Shining theme. No exaggeration: they put no effort in here.
* I did enjoy the ending, but let’s not pretend fanservice is difficult to pull off. No ideas were required to put this ending together.
The movie (probably wisely) doesn’t ape Kubrick’s visual stylings at all, outside of a recreation of the Big Wheel steadicam shot and a few other shots. The stuff in the Overlook is most often in Flanagan’s own style.
Just a failure from nearly every angle. Director’s first big misfire, too. This is King in fantasy mode, where he typically produces lesser works (The Stand, Dark Tower), so it’s not really a shock, although reviews swerved me by making me think this might be good. It kinda feels like King stapled an okay beginning to a Shining sequel onto a bunch of random ideas that had been sitting in his desk for decades. It bad.
