Having just seen it again I noticed some things that I’d never noticed before. It was quite unlike any other film I had seen, it had an enigmatic, dream-like quality and a sense of ambiguity which made it endlessly intriguing. Coupled with the fact that some of the topics it dealt with, namely conspiracies and the occult, had been something that I had become massively interested in for the same amount of time. I first read that Kubrick was going to make it in 1996, so it had been a long wait. I’d been anticipating it for a long time. I’ll never forget going to see the film for the first time. Given the subject matter, it was always going to be difficult to remove this background context from any appreciation of the film. Most obviously, this stems from the fact that Kubrick died just 5 days after the film was previewed to Warner executives. Faced with Kubrick’s superior intellect, they resort to negative sniping.įurthermore, EWS is a film which comes with an immense amount of contextual baggage that makes it hard to treat as as just a film. Added to the fact that critics don’t like to be made to feel dumb.
Attacked it for not achieving what it was never trying to achieve. So it’s “not erotic enough”? Who says that Kubrick wanted to make an erotic film anyway? Not realistic enough? Who says that Kubrick wanted to make a realistic film? It’s as if these critics went into the screening with this mental picture of what the film was “supposed” to be, and when it didn’t reflect their mental picture, they attacked it.
To me, I’ve always felt that critics were attacking the film for things the film was never trying to be in the first place. In the case of EWS, it was deemed “not erotic enough”, “not sexy enough”, “unrealistic”, “slow”, and so on. (Although of course there are exceptions). I personally find that the films that divide critical opinion with strong feelings both for and against, are often the most interesting films, even more so than those that have universal acclaim. This being as true for EWS as much as any film he made. One unifying factor of Kubrick’s filmography is that, on initial release at least, his films always seem to divide critical opinion.
A film which has been endlessly written about and which is one of my favourites, for reasons which will become clear as the article progresses. I’ve also seen it on DVD more than once, as well as individual sequences which I love to watch from time to time, notably the masked ritual sequence.Īnd so I have finally decided to write about the film. This gave me the chance to see it for the third time in the cinema, having seen it twice when it was first released. In recognition of this fact, it was given a re-release in cinemas. 2019 was the 20th anniversary of the release of Stanley Kubrick’s last film, Eyes Wide Shut.
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