Theater Report: Vantage Point

February 21, 2008
Ayala Center Cinema 1
7:30 PM
Attendance: 95% of capacity

Previews:

10,000 BC (looks enjoyable to watch, but the story is hard to deduce from the preview)
Horton Hears a Who (definitely for children)
WALL-E (from the creators of Finding Nemo, I’m definitely watching this one)
Meet The Spartans (a parody of “300”, looks funny and dumb at the same time)
I don’t remember the other previews.

Story:

The president of the United States attends a summit on anti-terrorism and got assassinated. Secret service agent Barnes, who took a bullet for the president in a previous assassination attempt, tried to catch the unknown shooter right there and then. The story is told from several points of view (thus, the title “Vantage Point”).

Thoughts:

This is a storytelling that I haven’t seen before, or I don’t remember seeing before. So its storytelling was fresh to me. You’d think that watching a film constantly being rewound several times, each time presenting a different vantage point of the same central situation is boring, but it wasn’t. Okay, maybe you wouldn’t think that, but I certainly did. I expected it to be boring. I even thought it was going to be a political drama (but then that’s my fault because I haven’t seen or read an ad for this film). I probably wouldn’t have gone to this movie had it not been for free (the company I worked for have what we call “Movie Nights” where every month they chose a movie that we have the opportunity to watch for free). When the email for this month’s Movie Night came and I learned it was going to be “Vantage Point”, I commented to my colleagues that I wish they chose “Jumper”. But I saw “Jumper” a week ago and now that I saw both movies I thought the company got it right in choosing “Vantage Point”. It was great, edge-of-your-seat thriller from beginning to end. Later in the movie the story just went improbable, but it’s okay. The premise itself, I think, called for improbability in order for the film to be made. I’m not a fan of its plot, but I’m definitely a fan of how it was told and the pace that it was told. It’s the kind of storytelling that you only get to see in good television these days (“24”, “Lost”, “Prison Break”). I thought “Vantage Point” showed me, if anything, how TV’s “24” would look like in the big screen and how it would sound like in a Dolby Digital theater. I heard rumors of a “24” movie and I think it would be great.

Would I see it again? Maybe I’ll see it again in DVD, there’s not much reason to watch it again once you knew who did what. Would I recommend it to my friends? Yes.