Like you, I became interested in this film after watching Project Greenlight 3 and following the misadventures of 49 year old underdog John Gulager. Dimension Films had selected Marcus Dunstan and Patrick Melton's script for Feast to produce because it was the most marketable and they wanted a Project Greenlight film to turn a profit for once. Project Greenlight absolutely loathed the script and partially out of malice they selected Gulager as the director, a filmmaker whose shorts were technically impressive and had a strange quality that seemed borne entirely from whole-cloth, but who was also incredibly shy and unassertive. The greenest of the green. After the film was completed everybody involved believed that the gamble paid off. I don't know, perhaps they were willfully deceiving themselves. Feast is a mess, the kind of mess that only a system as flawed as fundamentally flawed as Project Greenlight could have produced.
Dunstan and Melton's script should have never seen the light of day. It evinces a real hatred for the cinema, I mean they hate hate hate movies. They don't only hate movies of substance they hate movies that work. This isn't about not taking yourself seriously; Dunstan and Melton seem to think a toaster is pretentious because it toasts bread like it's supposed to. Their notion of being clever is to tell us (via freeze-frames) how long the characters are going to live and then alter the predictions through the course of the movie. Think about that. They don't expect you to automatically be familiar with these conventions; they actively underline them for you and then violate them saying that you were stupid for buying into the conventions that they just underlined for you. The characters are flat and undefined and Dunstan and Melton underline this flatness by giving them names like "Hero" or "Harley Mama" while never infusing them with any archetypal significance as doing so would be "predictable" and thus unhip. If you ask me, they're struggling to distract from the fact that they can't write believable three-dimensional human characters and even worse, that they really don't have anything that they want to say. Except I guess, that movies are stupid and so we're not going to even bother to try to write a real one.
And what about the monsters? They have sex and then the female instantly gives birth to an infant monster. Huh? I'm prepared to buy into a lot of things, but I draw the line well before split-second gestations. Who are these monsters? Where are they coming from? Why are they attacking these people, either on a literal level or a symbolic level? They are doing it for no other reason than to cover them in blood and slime and give the screenwriters a horror movie to feel superior to.
But as bad as the script is, I'm sad to say that there is still a whole lot of blood on Gulager's hands. Most shots in the film are held for no longer than four seconds and because Dunstan and Melton think themselves too cool to develop interesting characters that we care about and have filled the film with nothing but action sequences, this quickly becomes exhausting. Gulager fills the film with jump scares, one of the most effective but also one of the most cheap and primitive of audience manipulations. He uses so many that you walk away a little battered. The film is like a box of Lucky Charms with nothing but marshmallows. The ending is really good. Really really good. Purely on a film-making standard. The movie hasn't earned it. I hope that Gulager has some substance in him for his next film, because he is totally unable to rely on style alone.
Dunstan and Melton's script should have never seen the light of day. It evinces a real hatred for the cinema, I mean they hate hate hate movies. They don't only hate movies of substance they hate movies that work. This isn't about not taking yourself seriously; Dunstan and Melton seem to think a toaster is pretentious because it toasts bread like it's supposed to. Their notion of being clever is to tell us (via freeze-frames) how long the characters are going to live and then alter the predictions through the course of the movie. Think about that. They don't expect you to automatically be familiar with these conventions; they actively underline them for you and then violate them saying that you were stupid for buying into the conventions that they just underlined for you. The characters are flat and undefined and Dunstan and Melton underline this flatness by giving them names like "Hero" or "Harley Mama" while never infusing them with any archetypal significance as doing so would be "predictable" and thus unhip. If you ask me, they're struggling to distract from the fact that they can't write believable three-dimensional human characters and even worse, that they really don't have anything that they want to say. Except I guess, that movies are stupid and so we're not going to even bother to try to write a real one.
And what about the monsters? They have sex and then the female instantly gives birth to an infant monster. Huh? I'm prepared to buy into a lot of things, but I draw the line well before split-second gestations. Who are these monsters? Where are they coming from? Why are they attacking these people, either on a literal level or a symbolic level? They are doing it for no other reason than to cover them in blood and slime and give the screenwriters a horror movie to feel superior to.
But as bad as the script is, I'm sad to say that there is still a whole lot of blood on Gulager's hands. Most shots in the film are held for no longer than four seconds and because Dunstan and Melton think themselves too cool to develop interesting characters that we care about and have filled the film with nothing but action sequences, this quickly becomes exhausting. Gulager fills the film with jump scares, one of the most effective but also one of the most cheap and primitive of audience manipulations. He uses so many that you walk away a little battered. The film is like a box of Lucky Charms with nothing but marshmallows. The ending is really good. Really really good. Purely on a film-making standard. The movie hasn't earned it. I hope that Gulager has some substance in him for his next film, because he is totally unable to rely on style alone.