Awake not Woke!

WOKKERS

Ugh... Where do I start? Let's start with the main character: a 'woman' that looks 100% like a man (not even a tomboy, 100% A DUDE), your typical transgender/non-binary BS. Of course she is an insufferable radical activist with the most annoying voice, and she will never never NEVER EVER shut up (Imagine Greta Thunberg but 100 times more annoying)!. Of course she has to be the only one that is brave, strong, capable of the impossible, raising her voice, girlbossing her way even above royalty. The plot? Jeez, even Ferngully and Guardians of the Galaxy 3 were waaaay more subtle. Yes, MAN is the EVIL destroyer of nature, especially if he is white. Speaking of white, every 'good' or non-relevant character is black, brown or female, even male animals are depicted as cowards, non-caring, dumb, or plain evil compared to the females, of course! Why am I not surprised? Movies like Avatar show you the issue in a very entertaining way, making you care, making you feel invested. This movie feels like your typical insufferable vegan standing outside your favourite meat restaurant, nagging and yelling at you for being a 'murderer'. No... just NO.

Well 5 minutes in and I already absolutely hate the kid and want the character to die off. Spoilers follow but it's all in the first 10 minutes anyway. Movie tells us the white male is an abusive, racist p.o.s. who hates the kid, except it never shows any of that on screen other than 1 loud verbal fight with the kids mother. She than violently attacks and bashes him over the head and left for unconscious. We are not shown or told why. She leaves the idiot moron child behind and escapes. The male comes to and goes outside with a gun. Reasonable after being attacked. The unhinged and apparently mentally deranged child shoots an arrow at him narrowly missing. TWICE! He does nothing but tries to talk the kid down, even though he's holding a gun and the kid is actively trying to shoot him. Sounds like a violent abusive person to me. The kid than shoots him and dances around singing and celebrating like an absolute psychotic future serial killer. That's not a good start. The writing is pretty bad. A character in a dinner is acting shady talking on the phone and writes down a meeting place and time on a napkin, then immediately crumbles it up and leaves it on his plate and leaves. WTF was the point of writing it down then? This is boring pretentious filmmaking at it's worst. Seems all males are either idiots, violent criminals or both and just all around bad. The females are all innocent victims just trying to survive. 45 minutes of stupidity was all I could take.

This isn’t free of woke content.

It’s not a bad movie, but yeah, it definitely has woke elements. Just because it’s a Guillermo del Toro film doesn’t mean it avoids that kind of stuff. Pretty much everything he makes is heavily rooted in social symbolism, and in this case the female character is clearly shaped by a kind of feminism that doesn’t really line up with the time period the movie is trying to portray. The messaging is there from the very start, and it’s distracting. At times it’s so on the nose it almost feels like a modern day "Karen". That said, the movie still has strong craftsmanship, great cinematography and solid execution. But at the end of the day, it’s just another Frankenstein story, nothing more. Way too much hype for a filmmaker who tends to get overpraised in that space. And that's fine, he does his job very well. But, it doesn’t break new ground or redefine anything, it’s just well put together, and that’s it. P.S.: I do like his movies, but this one feels like a straight-up cash grab.

Great acting

Minimal scene movies like this tend to showcase good acting skills. Chris Pratt hit it out of the park, like Colin Farrell in Phone Booth, or the full cast of The Man from Earth. The only woke element I noticed is the diminutive black lady beating a full-size white guy in a rooftop brawl. It would be a spoiler to discuss more about her. The story is not bad. It is similar to The Minority Report. A similar concept was tried in real life. Algorithmic programs were used to determine sentencing of criminals with no consideration of ethnicity or gender. It was a failure. Black culture was triggering longer, more severe sentencing. It had the effect of appearing even more racist than the human judges.