Crawl - Mid-Level Monster Movie
Quick Thoughts: Crawl (2019)
An estranged father and daughter are trapped in a gator-infested homed during a flood.
Crawl is an effective mid level monster movie and thriller. There's much to enjoy and a little to scratch your head about. The set up and general logical construction of the narrative is not egregious in any way, which is to say, this is in the most basic of ways, quite believable. This matters because this film centralises a game of logic, of trying to figure ones way out of a situation; if the characters act stupid, why should the audience forgive them. And whilst characters are drawn out as rather clichéd and simply written, the representation of a father daughter team trying to survive is grounding and engaging.
Onto what the film lacks. Firstly, thematic weight; Crawl isn't trying to build a narrative of incredible substance despite some efforts to capture a sense of pride and persistence - which holds some affect. Next, the monsters, or rather, alligators. The gators look like huge Nile crocodiles, they move far too slow and are too clearly a device in a narrative. Though some of the kills are enjoyably silly, the unrealistic rendering of the alligators is something that audiences will inevitably find too obvious. Second to this, though lead characters are put in danger and are even maimed across the narrative, they appear rather invincible in all of the scenes in which they aren't being chewed on. That is to say, the damage sustained by characters has no real lasting dramatic weight as a bite may give a character a limp in one scene, but won't stop them fighting or swimming in another.
In total, Crawl lacks a needed impressionism. We do not feel characters pain and the severity of their circumstances enough. This is not a lifeless film, but, it rather desperately needed better storyboarding and more time put into the visual-linguistic construction of scenes and maybe less put into CGI. That said, I enjoyed this quite a bit.
An estranged father and daughter are trapped in a gator-infested homed during a flood.
Crawl is an effective mid level monster movie and thriller. There's much to enjoy and a little to scratch your head about. The set up and general logical construction of the narrative is not egregious in any way, which is to say, this is in the most basic of ways, quite believable. This matters because this film centralises a game of logic, of trying to figure ones way out of a situation; if the characters act stupid, why should the audience forgive them. And whilst characters are drawn out as rather clichéd and simply written, the representation of a father daughter team trying to survive is grounding and engaging.
Onto what the film lacks. Firstly, thematic weight; Crawl isn't trying to build a narrative of incredible substance despite some efforts to capture a sense of pride and persistence - which holds some affect. Next, the monsters, or rather, alligators. The gators look like huge Nile crocodiles, they move far too slow and are too clearly a device in a narrative. Though some of the kills are enjoyably silly, the unrealistic rendering of the alligators is something that audiences will inevitably find too obvious. Second to this, though lead characters are put in danger and are even maimed across the narrative, they appear rather invincible in all of the scenes in which they aren't being chewed on. That is to say, the damage sustained by characters has no real lasting dramatic weight as a bite may give a character a limp in one scene, but won't stop them fighting or swimming in another.
In total, Crawl lacks a needed impressionism. We do not feel characters pain and the severity of their circumstances enough. This is not a lifeless film, but, it rather desperately needed better storyboarding and more time put into the visual-linguistic construction of scenes and maybe less put into CGI. That said, I enjoyed this quite a bit.
