re: Under the Skin (2013) Scarlett Johansson

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so your biggest problem with the film is that given the subject, it was a feature length film and not a short film?

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Well, no, that was only one of my observations.

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I'm curious to know exactly why you think it lacked substance.

The movie asks what it means to be human, what it means to have emotions.

It's pretty straight forward. We see an alien learn what it means to be human. We see a hunter and a seducer of men become the hunted. Does having emotion make us weak?

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That's almost precisely why I think it was attempting to stretch out a short movie into a long one. Note that I'm not saying I'd prefer a short movie. I'm saying that they needed more substance to justify the length. I certainly understood it just fine. Compared to some of my other favorite movies, it's pretty straight-forward.

Other than puzzling out what the general situation is -- a puzzle, I concede, was made easier by the fact I knew going in what the general situation was -- the movie relies on our willingness to indulge the cinematography, mood, music, etc at the expense of actually exploring the theme to any particular depth. It can essentially be summarized as "alien encounters humans, alien eats humans, alien starts regretting." Which is fine in itself except that the various mise-en-scenes don't really offer any new revelations or insights. In other words, there's not an enormous amount of intellectual differentiation or exploration after a while; ergo, the plot grows repetitive on a thematic level. This flaw emphasizes the role of the cinematography and music to the point where one starts to realize that these aspects are frequently compensating for rather than enhancing the movie's story and themes. The issue of lack of substance is primarily a complaint about the director's indulgence in repetition, not about the basic ideas and themes behind the movie itself.

My counterexample would be Tarkovsky's "Solyaris" (or the Clooney one, if you prefer, which I feel is unfairly maligned). For a considerable portion of the film, pretty much nothing happens. It's an atmospheric mood piece. But not a single aspect is redundant or unnecessary. With "Under the Skin" I had to force myself to ignore the atmospheric machinations of the director precisely because I found a large portion of it descending into tautology. Had it been a shameless slice-of-life piece, it would have been easier for me, ironically-enough.

Look, I liked the movie at the basic level. Hell, I own it on DVD/Blu-ray (I prefer to own hard media whenever I can. I'm not down with the purely digital revolution.) It was ambitious in its conceptualization, if not always in its execution, and, yes, it's easy to get lost in the mood even if I had to force myself to ignore the machinations. So don't get me wrong. On a 10 point scale, I'd score it a solid 7.5. But it could have been so much better.