Eddington could have been Ari Aster’s breakout non-horror hit, but the story doesn’t give us anything we haven’t seen before.
Eddington was something I was really looking forward to watching, but I was ultimately underwhelmed and disappointed. This film could’ve turned out to be something really special with all the A-list actors they had in it, but it ended up being lackluster overall.
They had Joaquin Phoenix, Emma Stone, and Pedro Pascal, to name a few. I’m pretty frustrated, as there was so much potential in this. All the actors are giving their best in Eddington, and it really shows, but the problem is that the story is lacking.
The story in Eddington is about a pandemic (Covid) in a small town. There’s more to it than that, obviously, but that’s most of what the story is about. It shows the world in 2020 with Covid and all the riots and protests that we had. So it’s not showing us anything we haven’t seen before.
Anyone alive right now who watches that movie lived through Covid, and they aren’t going to want to relive it again. Maybe in 20 or 30 years, someone who didn’t experience Covid can watch Eddington and get a different experience out of it. But after living through Covid, I didn’t really like having to see it all again. It is too soon.
It sucks because Eddington has such great cinematography, acting, and production value, but it just shows that with a bad story, it can ruin everything. Because the story lacked substance and none of the characters really felt interesting, I had a hard time following it. It also didn’t help with the film’s length being 2 1/2 hours long.
Eddington had some really cool sequences, especially at the end of the movie, but it felt like it was too little too late for that. It has that kind of no-country-for-men style where it’s very graphic and in your face, but it was all or nothing because I didn’t care for the characters or the story. Joaquin Phoenix did his best in this film, but it really fell short, along with Pedro Pascal.
Ari Aster is a very talented young director and is responsible for two of the best horror movies in the last 20 years, I believe, with Midsommar and Hereditary. He has tried to shift away from her with his previous two films, and they definitely aren’t doing as well critically or commercially.
I think he could do something that’s non-horror, but so far, he hasn’t made a worthwhile one. Of course, he’s not going to want to stick to this one genre, but he is definitely at his best when he’s making horror.
