MovieChat Forums > I Declare War (2014) Discussion > Disappointed. Especially compared to 'Me...

Disappointed. Especially compared to 'Mean Creek' or 'Lord of the Flies'

posted 11 years ago by jdinatale
4 replies | jump to latest

It had a ton of potential, but there was a lot that went wrong.

The acting was really bad. I doubt more than a couple of the kids could actually make a career out of acting. They were probably just local child actors they brought in due to the budget. But I was willing to ignore that, considering this is low budget and they can't afford to hire talented child actors.

But the script was really bad. I wasn't a kid THAT long ago (I'm 22), and kids simply don't talk like that. Several times lines were read, and I was like, "Wait, what? What kid says that?"

There could have been a lot of depth to the "imagination vs. reality" theme, but the writers didn't develop it beyond the kids pretending the sticks were really AK's.

The film meanders and loses steam in the second half. It becomes apparent that nothing is really at stake. There were no consequences of the game. At the end of the day, the kids will go home and will probably hang out at school the next day.

In Mean Creek and Lord of the Flies, people actually die. There were real life consequences for the children's actions. Not so here, which led me not to care much about what happened.

I don't know if the solution would have been to have one of the characters accidentally killed, perhaps the Asian brother gets stoned to death, because that might have been a cliche....but anything would have been better than what we got.

About 1 hour into the movie, I honestly mentally checked out. It just started to drag.

[–] therefdotcom 11 years ago

yeah. three more things:

- they were not trapped on an island, they could have just gone home and i am sure in real life most of them would
- while we are at it. remembering my own childhood, out of the bunch we saw at least 4 would have gone "you guys suck, i go home" at one point in the game. why even keep up the game? in my childhood, once we had found out about what the psychopath did to him, we would have kicked the *beep* out of him and then go eat a pizza.
- they had airguns. the shootout scene. how would they even figure out, who hit who? being kids, nobody would admit that they had been hit.

terrible.

"laugh and the world laughs with you. Weep and you weep alone." - Dae-su Oh

[–] Starcraft_90 11 years ago

I played guns as a kid with plastic non airsoft guns by shouting "bang bang! got you <insert name>!" And we had good times, I feel like there should have been more kids and more cutting between sticks and real weapons

[–] Bonehead-XL 10 years ago

I don't know why someone was hoping a kid would actually die in this. That's not what the movie is about. It's a coming of age story that contrasts the drama of adolescence with hyper-serious war movie cliches. The way the film was shot was the trick, showing what was just a normal game as a serious conflict.

[–] bartallenii 10 years ago

It was enough that the *fake* deaths were played out as being real. Once a kid got hit (with the exception of the first blonde kid and Quinn, who was just being imagined), they disappeared for the rest of the movie.

"Without management, there is only chaos."
"Can we try the chaos thing?"