Split is still a bad movie.

Alt ending: They cook the fish, so Justice can be served

"Life itself actually wound up having less of an impact than people were expecting" is a funny sentence if, like me, you didn't know that "Life Itself" was the title of a movie

a tuna named justice... "I know writers who use subtext and they are all cowards"

Matthew McConaughey is slowly getting riskier and riskier about his role choices as a form of rebellion against the years he’s spent playing romcom protagonists and honestly .. we should all just let him wild out and have this specific breakdown

"Life itself had less impact than people were expecting" sounds so much like it needs to be in a Hitchhikers Guide kind of story.

"The Fish Is Going To Be A Metaphor" should've been the name of my intro to literature class

Every time I hear or read somebody talking about this movie, it sounds like they're struggling to explain a weird dream that they had.

I don't know what's better: "Man getting killed by a fish named Justice" or "Boy scatters his dead brother's metaphorical ashes on the cheering crowd".

My suspicion is that this movie was actually conceptualized the other way around: they came up with this "it's secretly a video game the whole time!" twist and then realized that in order to turn it into a movie there needed to be an actual plot with characters before it, hence all the padding and the fact that the twist doesn't actually change anything in any meaningful way. Which happens very often when a writer builds a story around a twist instead of building a twist that services the story.

Henceforth, this movie shall be known as The Fish of Henry.

I love it when Dan is looking all stunned and flabbergasted and frustrated and confused. In fact it confused him so much he called Hathaway Margot Robbie at one point. :'D

Brb, making a romhack of Bass Pro Shops: The Strike to kill my abusive father with

This is what Black Mirror would look like if it was written and directed by David Cage.

"I need to see normal movies again." Dan Olson -2019

I can't help but think this twist would be better served in an actual metanarrative indie game like Super Hot or The Beginner's Guide... Like imagine if it began as a typical fishing sim and slipped in the whole modded revenge fantasy plot a few hours in...

A fish named Justice? I think you just watched Aquaman while stoned

Everything I heard about this movie is telling me that M. Night Shymalan secretly released two movies in one week apparently.

"Matthew McConaughey, in the real world, is dead." Out of context, that sounds like a conspiracy theory.

i just watched you talk about this movie for 30 minutes and i still feel like i have no idea what it's about

This is the story of a game desperately wanting a player to finish the main quest line, but all they do is the fishing mini-game.

This is the most perplexed I have ever seen Dan about a movie as a whole

"The movie has two parts: the real world and the video game world". Well, that escalated quickly.

Watching you try to explain the plot is an amusing experience by itself.

Whenever he said "big fish movie," I kept thinking he meant the movie adaptation of the musical "Big Fish".

Fish Of Justice was my favorite song in that Toby Fox game

When you mentioned the video game I literally screamed what. I saw a trailer for this before Aquaman and all they showed was McConaughey on a boat, Anne Hathaway hires him to kill her husband, and everyone in town knows what's going on. WHAT IS THIS ABOUT VIDEO GAMES

Lord, please save us from movies whose only knowledge and concept of "what video games are" and "how computers work" comes from The Matrix.

You said "and then" after the news reel part and I literally yelled "AND THEN?!"

Having the game be this symbolic battle with a fish feels like exactly the sort of thing a pretentious writer would make up for an overly convoluted film. I'm no psychologist, but I feel like if a kid was going to make a video game to process/act out killing their abusive father, a real kid would just...make a video game where they kill their dad with a knife.

I live vicariously through film reviews of these kind of films - specifically those I have no time or inclination to see. Because the criticism/reviews/reactions are undoubtedly more interesting. For instance, the idea of 'Collateral Beauty' is way more interesting to me than I assume the actuality of it is. PS great work on the stream with HB and the contribution to Mermaids. You are all stars.

"2019 is already off to a wild year. Wild year for- Anything can happen, who knows what's coming next."

As you go on listing movies to compare this movie to, I frowned deeper and deeper. What IS this movie?! *checks Wiki* ...wat

I feel like "pulp noir fishing simulator" is a video game idea with legs though, particularly if you get Jon St. John or somebody to provide grizzled narration. "I force the hook through the worm, its tough flesh yielding to the cold steel. The worm is dead, but it doesn't know it. It twists and it wriggles. It honestly thinks it can still get off the hook and everything will be okay. It doesn't even know about the fish yet. That's all of us - we know we're on the hook, but we spend so much time trying to twist off that we never see the fish - OUR fish - until it's too late."

It sounds like this movie cracked open your skull, poked around, scrambled something, and gingerly closed it up.

I did not ever expect in the year of our lord 2019 to have someone refer to The Beach as a comparison to any movie ever. What a time to be alive. Take solace, that is a reference I had quickly available in my mind. I will never forget Leonardo DiCaprio playing real life Crash Bandicoot and drug trip machine gunning tourists on a beach.

I am 7 minutes in & this review is the most tense I've ever been in my life

I found that I have recently become addicted to this channel, fantastic videos

moodboard: "bean completely and utterly broken and decalibrated"

The second I read about the twist in that Polygon article I knew this was coming

Yes, Dan, yes. Alone, talking to and making eye contact with camera, minimal and supportive editing, and a vague but persistent sense of existential terror throughout. This is the vlog format that I crave.

I was honestly hoping the twist to SERENITY was that Justice was a real character, he's a giant kaiju-style fish monster instead of an over-sized tuna, and the film was secretly a giant monster thriller all along. The actual twist of the film is still interesting and worth checking out but as a giant monster fan I would have preferred a secret sea monster flick.

'The Beach is an amazing movie' my inner teenager shouts before realizing I haven't watched The Beach in 15 years

Sounds like this writer/director was like "I saw Black Mirror once, I could do that." Also you should go see Destroyer. That should help center you again.

Ahem...Dill becomes "conscious" that not only that he's in this game, but that there are rules to it. In the movie, Dill is referred as being a good person. At the end of the day, his son wants to see if he has his father's "approval" to kill his stepfather by seeing if Dill actually goes through with it or just continues with the standard rules of the game.

I mean this as a completely serious question: what does someone who writes, produces and directs a movie like this 'want'?

A saw there was a movie named "Serenity" playing at my local theatre and assumed it was the Firefly movie. Never heard of this before

I can confirm that Serenity is spoiler proof, because the story is so insane you won't believe it's real, then you watch it and realize "holy shit, they weren't lying."

I saw it on Friday, making sure to go in completely spoiler free. Annnnnnd then it was obvious from FRAME ONE what was going on, more or less. It was such a ham-fisted execution of what I'm guessing was a decent (if always half-baked) idea on paper. Like, I can see where it would have sounded interesting from a pitch/initial script, but the way things ultimately were cut together scream STUDIO INTERFERENCE. I can only imagine the studio notes. "You should blow your reveal as early as possible in case people don't get it., and then just keep piling on the hints so structurally the whole movie is inert." I just loathed the execution, and it's what kept it from being "bad good" for me: I was bored during long stretches b/c there was zero tension since it was SO CLEAR it was a damn video game. If they'd not shown their hand so early, it might have worked--probably still been bad, but maybe in a campy good way, because the turn would have actually felt like an actual turn. Instead, starting with the close up of the kids eye and zooming into the ocean/up to the boat made it immediately clear everything we were seeing was in this kid's mind--it was either going to be a St. Elsewhere-style reveal or what it ended up being--video game. And then all the ridiculous overlay shots w/ the programming code and the kid looking at his screen, him "talking" to his dad in the ocean--god it was all so poorly done. That plus the heavy-handed clues dropped in Anne Hathaway's dialogue when they talk about Patrick... I felt like I was being hit in the head with an anvil. And, then, yet they draggggggged it on to the third act before doing the "reveal." Also how creepy is it that we're meant to believe that this kid created parts of this video game where his DAD has sex with some random lady + his mom. He made porn of his parents. WHAT CHOICES. (Diane Lane also disappears from the story completely, so shrug emoji) The actors were trying really hard, and there were actually some decent performances. Man, Matthew tried. It was just an utter failure, all around.

At first I just heard "Margot Robbie, abusive husband" and I was like *"Excuse me, what???* and then it dawned on me that they were two different people.

"I need to see normal movies, again." - Dan Olson, 2019

I had the luxury of watching Robin Hood (2018) and then Serenity (2019) within like...two months of each other with my best friend. There hasn't been such a great streak of totally baffling movies since then imo. ALTHOUGH I strongly recommend "Wild Mountain Thyme" (2020). It's not a good movie. It's also not remarkably bad. But the twist is amazing.

"2019's off to a wild start - anything could happen, who knows what's coming next" Never was a truer word spoken...

Despite knowing the twist, despite having seen this video like a year ago, it still feels like it comes out of nowhere

I really enjoy the off the cuff vlogs, I hope you do them regularly.

you forgot collateral beauty!

Who would've thought that "Fuck You, It's January©" would inspire Dan to film some of his best vlogs

Two vlog reviews in one month? Dan must have a lot of free time right now

good video, [unidentified caller]!

“Now you are dead, at the fins of justice” 😂

SERENITY NOW!

*Gameshow Audience in creepy unison*: "But what's the twist?"

I realized six minutes in that you were describing the same movie that my mom described to me in similarly incoherent terms about half a year ago. I think at the time my response was something like "that sounds kinda terrible" and she said "yeah, I guess it was" and then I never watched it.

So I had to stop at your "I need water" moment to find the trailer for this thing I didn't know existed and now I watched the trailer and now I'm confused because it looks like that's not at all the movie you watched. So...I...um.

I was honestly expecting this to be 30 minutes of Dan blinking hard and staring off into the middle distance.

Any other Firefly fans just a tiny bit miffed at the this movie's name?

I saw a version of this with a "Q&A" at the end and the director definitely doesn’t understand video games past that thing my sons so immersed in and you can tell McConaughey knows it’s bad so keeps talking about fishing and how it helped the economy of the small island it was on justifying it’s existence

You could probably name a whole trope after "a fish named justice". In fact, if I get the chance, that's exactly what I'm going to do

HE SCATTERS MATTHEW MCCONAUGHEY'S ASHES OVER THE CROWD

Shymalan got out twisted

I need a tshirt with The Mighty Fins Of Justice written on it immediately

Speaking as someone who doesn't watch that many movies, describing every part of this movie by just throwing out movies I've never seen in rapid succession makes me utterly bewildered. I mean, I guess that's the theme, maybe? Even when you mention movies I've seen, I don't have time to decode what similarities they might have in time for the next one to already be thrown at me. "Oh, so it's like The Matrix and The Truman Show... so secretly trans trenchcoat gunfighters make funny faces for TV ratings?" The first 7 minutes of this video may as well be in a foreign language.

"Jenny Nicholson's video is going to be so much better than mine" is such a mood. Honestly, i can never be a youtuber while she's on the platform. I'll just never compare

These are almost as great as your film dissections. oh my god “You have been killed by the fins of justice” 🤣

This is so upsetting because honestly that plot sounds like a really good black mirror episode that could have been a great film....like this could have been genius

The Mighty Fins of Justice new band name I call it

"We're getting a lot of these, these days -- how are all of these getting green-lit??!" . I'm glad I'm not the only one completely baffled by how some things even get past the idea-pitch stage. Let alone all the way to wrap-up-promote-and-premiere... and all without ever evolving from their messy, uncoordinated and unfleshed-out idea-infancy. Seriously, just... how??

I don't think I've ever been more baffled by a movie trailer in my life. By the end of it, I wasn't even sure it was a real movie. It was like a surreal horror-movie-recut of a fishing-themed comedy movie.

At some point in the future: the art of storytelling and Serenity(2019).

So it's like 'Old Man and the Sea' crossed with Surf Ninjas.

I got all excited because I read the title really quickly and thought oh good, he’s going to talk about Serenity!! Wrong Serenity. ☹️

I can imagine seeing it nearly immediately after the stream/the associated minimal sleep did not help. or, the way you're talking reminds me of how I sound after I've been awake too long.

The movie that came to my mind when you explained the ending was actually Sucker Punch

I went into this movie already knowing there was a twist, but even if I didn't, I still would have figured it out almost immediately. The "foreshadowing" is more like beating you over the head with a fish named "METAPHOR".

9:38 ahh, good old municipal tap water.

To quote the magnificent Barry Burton: "What? What is this?"

I'm still debating watching this film, though the moment I read a review in The Guardian I looked for the ending. For what you're saying, it seems both a noir and a film about the imaginary and videogames were wasted. I thought about Wreck it Ralph and Lego: the first for how characters have their lives inside a videogame and the second for its connection between the "film" and the reality of the child playing Lego. And again, we have a magical boy solving his mother's issues for her. Anna Hathaway and not Margot Robbie, lolol. It seems to be an odd film stemming from an eccentric idea. And thanks for the returning to this format for the V-Logs. It's much more fluid and pleasant to listen to, at least for me.

Late to the party by a few years, but I gotta' comment, one could have two other readings of the ending: The first is that the kid is so lost in his simulation that he's created an NPC of himself and is now living vicariously through that NPC, or did so in order to give Dill the closure he's incapable of having in reality. The second is that the kid somehow uploaded his consciousness in the game to live out his life there. Which considering he's like, fourteen and made sapient computer programs capable of interacting with him directly? Sure, why not.

Commented on your Split review that you needed to see Serenity like 4 hours ago, I take a nap, and my wish has come true

Oh, good! I began to fear that DiCaprio's The Beach was a hallucination I had.

I feel like an early draft of this had the kid recreate his dad in a detailed simulation, but a later rewrite changed it to a "videogame" because somebody was worrried about audience comprehension.

I love your breakdowns of ridiculous films.

Okay, but can we talk about this being _another_ movie about "the dangers of video games"? It's a story where a child gets so absorbed by their game, they kill a person and then go catatonic and/or suicidal. Haven't we had enough of old people making big productions in order to show how little they like and understand gamer culture? This is disturbingly like Mazes & Monsters. Except it was released in 2019, when I assumed the world had moved on from that sort of out-of-touch, reactionary thinking.

Wait, what the hell? That's Senran Kagura Peach Beach Splash in the background!

Every time I hear 'Book of Henry,' I think it's 'Book of Revelation' because until I googled it just now, I legit couldn't remember the name of that movie but kept thinking it was 'Book of Henry.' The two are not remotely similar.

Oh god I've been looking forward to this so much

Any mention of The Beach just makes me think, "The book was better."

sometimes i layer your videos (at a low volume) with asmr videos, and it's very relaxing. this one was very very soothing.

I'm 10 minutes in the video and have no idea what the movie is about. Liked anyway.

I remember seeing trailers for this film, now that I'm 10 minutes through the video. They marketed it as some sexy, twisty, revenge thriller drama thing, pretty much only showing the "can you kill my husband please" stuff, knowing now that it's like a video game is the strangest thing ever