This was surprisingly good. I know I gave it a bad score, but my expectations for a YouTuber movie were on the floor. I had visions of the Smosh Movie or the Fred Movie, but this absolutely felt like a standard bad movie which a normal person might just have walked into.
I will start with some positives. I think despite the film being set entirely in one room, there were some good visual moments. The x-ray camera and coordinates being the only form of interaction with this unknown world outside of the ship created some tense moments, while also working as a good way to make a small budget feel like a compelling alien environment. Mark’s performance far exceeded my expectations, even though he very much leans on the “loud is good” school of dramatic acting at times. Ehhhhhhh—I will be honest, I think that might be the end of the good section already.
To start off the bad section, I will now proceed to critique the two aspects of the film that I enjoyed. Both fall flat due to one word: “repetition.” Fifteen minutes in, this film had exhausted all of its more interesting camera shots. With such a limited space, I am not expecting some extravagant dolly zoom, but it felt like they were doing a close up of condensation on the walls or blood dripping from them every fifth cut for the first thirty minutes. They did the same fisheye shot from his hands on the controls up to his sweating face like five times, and he must have commented three or four times on it being “so fucking hot” after a shot of condensation on the pipes was shown. While repetition can mirror monotony, or isolation and embolden their tension and visuals, Iron Lung just stagnates. If the shots were more static and were cycled through almost like security camera footage or a Resident Evil game, you could overlook the repetitive shots as a stylistic choice. But they really wanted to make the cinematography feel dynamic here, then ran out of steam halfway through the movie.
The cinematography wasn’t the only repetitive element. The script in this film was just bizarre. Mark either comments on how hot it is, on the fact nobody is telling him anything, or says “FUCK ME” truly every five minutes. Don’t get me wrong, these are valid grievances for the lead man to voice, but as a viewer stuck in a pod with him for 2 FUCKING HOURS, it starts to wear thin REALLY quick.
At this stage, I have to mention the runtime….2 FUCKING HOURS!!!! Did I mention that yet? I have no problem with longer films; in fact, typically I enjoy them. Whether it’s One Battle or Marty Supreme pushing the norm of an award-winning blockbuster well into the two-hour mark, or The Brutalist bringing back intermissions. I just gave Seven Samurai a 5-star heart rating recently. So I have no problem with a long movie. This film did NOT warrant its runtime. One room, repeated shots, deja vu dialogue, and a truly nonsensical ending had me checking my watch multiple times in the cinema. The ending exposes the core adaptation issue: the game’s dread comes from player agency, which the film replaces with a baffling, unearned plot twist.
I could write 10 pages more about this film, but I simply am not arsed. My summary is: there were parts I did like, but this should have been a 30/40-minute short film. The fact it made it past an hour and a half was an achievement; the fact it then made it to two hours was an insult. I am actually excited to see what Mark does next, as I think there is a future for independently funded adaptations of niche video game stories. But they need to be episodes in a TV series rather than 2-hour cinematic drags.
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