I just watched a movie I quite enjoyed: Arctic. It's a survival movie, one of those where there's hardly anything said the entire movie. Afterwards, for kicks, I looked at some reviews.
Some reviews were like: "This was soooo boring. Nothing happened!" Others were like, "I was on the edge of my seat the whole time. Gripping!"
Some reviewers said, "The guy made so many bad decisions. He doesn't deserve to live." Others said, "It's nice to see a movie where the guy knows what he's doing and doesn't make stupid mistakes."
One guy wrote something along the lines of, "I've seen reviews talking about how good the script was. What script? There were like 10 lines and they were cliched!" The next guy wrote something like, "It's amazing how a good actor can deliver the same line three times at different points in the story and it means something totally different each time. So powerful!"
And of course there were varied views on the ending. There always are.
Personally, I was gripped. I didn't think it was slow at all. But then, I tend to like survival stories and get bored at the "exciting" action and fight scenes many people like.
I did think he made a couple of major bad decisions, but one I could swallow because I felt like I didn't quite know the whole situation but he did, and I trusted him. The other I could understand because of his exhaustion and the single-mindedness he'd had to employ to get as far as he had. People mentioned other things he should have done that I just assumed he'd done off screen, since it was the type of movie where we weren't spoon-fed everything. And yes, there were some smaller bad decision or unrealistic Hollywood bits, but overall I thought he came off as a pretty experienced outdoorsman. I liked that.
Overall, I thought it was a very good movie. Not perfect, but well worth the watching.
And it's a great example of how different people view art differently.
