The Movie Room

Vantage Point 2008, directed by Pete Travis

Rating: 4/10

I applaud this movie for the idea of doing a modern political thriller with current technology in the style of Rashomon, both because that movie is a classic and because I love paranoid political thrillers with assassination plotlines (looking at you Manchurian Candidate, and Parallax View, and too many others to name). Unfortunately, the reason that I think Rashomon works so well is missing here, so Vantage Point just feels repetitive and dull.

Rashomon works so well for me because I love that the story is being told after the event has already happened to an audience who was not there, so each of the narrators is unreliable as they tell their “side.” However, instead of having unreliable narrators here, we just follow eight different characters and see what happened literally through their eyes (but not through their minds, like in Rashomon). The tagline says “8 Strangers. 8 Points of View. 1 Truth.” What works so well about Rashomon is that at the end you don’t really know the truth; you just know what each side claims and you have to piece them together to come to your own interpretation of what you think might have maybe occurred. Here you are given the exact truth 8 times; so I guess the tagline is right, there is just one truth, but the 8 points of view are more like 8 different angles. The structure doesn’t help this grievance, as each point of view is cut off before some big event. In Rashomon, you get to see the whole story through each testimony and then start over again. Here you get part of a story, then it rewinds, then you get a bit further before it rewinds again, and then the cycle repeats ad nauseum. I want to judge this movie based on its own merits, but it mostly exists as a Rashomon gimmick film, so it is hard to judge it by ignoring how badly it fails at that when it might have been more passable as an ensemble piece that cuts back and forth between all these points of view as the events happen.

What makes this even more frustrating to me is that my beloved paranoid political thriller subgenre seems like it should be the perfect fit for Rashomon style storytelling. It would work so well to have one of these characters (maybe Sigourney Weaver? Or Dennis Quaid?) trying to put together the events by interviewing all these characters and having the stories not match up because everyone is adjusting the truth in their own image. That would better honor Rashomon(as well as more modern thrillers like The Usual Suspects) without feeling stupid and repetitious. There is no need to rewind this story so many times when it would have worked so much better if it was just more straightforward.

I know you are supposed to judge movies based on what they are and not on what you wish they did, but I feel justified here as I’m judging this movie based on what it so loudly proclaims itself to be and then fails at miserably. It is not a bad movie, it just feels incompetent at achieving the goals it sets itself.