Triangle of Sadness

This weekend brought on only one new film due to a very important dance competition being just around the corner, and that movie was Triangle of Sadness. Now we once again went into a film knowing nearly nothing, I had only heard that it was a comedy and that Woody Harelson was in it and quite frankly that's all I needed to hear so we booked our seats and settled in.

It started off as straight up comedy and the humor came in very strong in Act 1. The casting of lesser known actors for a film like this was a strong and excellent choice. The acting was phenomenal even when the script went a bit off the rails. There was quite a bit of filler in Act 1 but that fact doesn’t really hit you until the end of the film because Act 1 is also sort of aimless in that it doesn’t really set up the plot very well and you really can’t tell what the movie is going to be about from the beginning. Now speaking from a film structure standpoint, Act 1 is your set up. Act 1 is your thesis statement, it is supposed to tell your audience what your story is about and this one simply didn’t.

We then do a very weird cut into Act 2, one that doesn’t really make sense nor does it feel coherent to the tone that was set up in act 1. Act 2 set itself up to be a satirical comedy about capitalism and at this it does a fairly good job however it abandons this premise as fast as it throws it at the audience. Act 2 also had some unnecessary filler that didn’t fit into its narrative at all. The scene of the fertilizer tycoon and the captain going back and forth could have been approximately 10 minutes shorter, the entire ship crapping and vomiting could have also been cut in half. The physical humor overstayed its welcome. On top of that Woody Harrelson was simply wasted on this movie. He was hardly in it and if you are paying the man anyway the script could have better accommodated his talent.

We then end up on a deserted island, where we then spend the end of Act 2 and all of Act 3 in a commentary on gender roles. This film was messy and incoherent. It lacked a plot entirely and it seemed to attempt to subvert genre lines without understanding how that would affect the film's structure. The pacing was awful and it simply should have been a tight hour and a half instead of a painfully long two hours and fourteen minutes. The ending was rushed and not very well thought out. It ends ambiguously and not in a thriller, phycological, you are meant to have questions kind of way but in a; I’ve written a bunch of gibberish and I don’t know how to end it kind of way. Now my sweet husband pointed out that it may have been intentional that this film didn’t have a plot but the reality is that even if something is intentional doesn’t make it good.

Overall I think that the movie was a wasted opportunity that could have potentially satirized both capitalism and gender roles but instead it decided to vocalize every thought of the scriptwriter with no forethought or development. This whole movie felt like a first draft and it could have benefited from a different writer entirely. There is a decent story in there somewhere but once again a good story was killed by ego and self indulgence.