Recently
I watched a movie that taught me to never judge a film by its first impression
or by its first thirty minutes, to endure a movie until its crisis and climax,
when the true intentions and the intended message of the director are revealed,
when the movie gets better. Ben X was the opposite. I began watching the film
with anticipation and expectation; it ended as a sore disappointment.
In
the beginning, the novelty of the subject matter caught my eyes and interest. The
movie begins with a footage of an online RPG game in which the screen follows
the character running across the map of the virtual reality. The idea was
interesting, for never had I come across a movie where the setting is in a
digital game world. At first I expected the whole movie to take place in the
game world, where characters of the game were the characters of the movie, and
the monsters the villains. Of course, that would have led to a sever limitation
in the story development, and sure enough, it was revealed that the main
character is a teenage boy who plays the game. However, the method of skipping
between the real world and the game world in order to convey the viewpoint of
the game-immersed autistic boy was extremely effective.
Another filming technique that I found
well-suited to its purpose was the sudden close up of specific objects. The
autistic character possesses extraordinary intelligence and perception skills. He
notices even the smallest details, to an extent that one of the people
characterize it as being unable to "see the forest for the trees."
Indeed, this filming technique emphasizes this fact, for the viewer also
experiences a hard time listening to the said lines due to the detailed visual
close-ups.
However,
I found the documentary style, in which the screen switched between events and
interviews with people such as the parents of Ben, inconvenient. It was undoubtedly
a method that was employed in order to emphasize the fact that it was based on
a true story, and that the events may occur anywhere. But it also broke the
continuity of the story and further jumbled up the reality and order of events,
making it more confusing for the viewers to comprehend.
As
for the subject, I got the feeling that the movie was consciously trying too
hard to integrate things that were of public interest, such as the
discrimination against the disabled, bullying and induced suicide, and games,
in order to create a heavy and depressing atmosphere. But in terms of the
story, most of these were unnecessary. The character did not need to be
autistic in order to have been a target of bullying, and the game was a feeble
link in his encounter with Scarlite. And even the degree of bullying portrayed
in the movie was far less severe than those in real life, and possibly
insufficient to make someone kill himself.
The
largest reason that I found the later part of the film most unsatisfactory was
the plot. It was as though the movie had turned from a story about the cruelty
of bullying into a mind game or even a prank into tricking people to achieve a
goal. I had the impression that it was a crudely devised ending in order to
resolve the plot into a happy, pleasant ending.
Overall,
I felt that the movie was one that could have been developed to its full and
greater potential but was stalled by its efforts to meet the desires of the
general public.
