The Vast of Night (Andrew Patterson, 2020)

[Mr Sheldrake]

The UFO narrative is overly familiar and hampered by two long-winded eyewitness accounts that fail the goosebump test. The audio/visual elements are interesting- long, spectacular tracking shots that bring to mind Kaili Blues, traveling up and down the dusty streets of a small New Mexico town on a single night.

It’s late 1950s, tape recorders are in vogue, so are black rimmed glasses, just about everyone wears them, no contacts yet. It’s so dark you don’t notice the sleek shine of the classic cars on parade. Lots of overlapping dialogue and an exhilarating recreation of a high school basketball game.

Sarah McCormick and Jake Horowitz as the leads are spunky and in continuous motion, running and driving, their incongruous friendship adds spice to the puzzle they find themselves in. An Amazon Prime Original. A surprising 84 metascore from 35 critics.

[therewillbeblus]

I was severely underwhelmed by The Vast of Night and agree with Mr Sheldrake that the effusive reviews are puzzling. I get that the point is to tell a familiar story in a new way by focusing on the people responding on the ground to an obscure force, but the pieces put together just didn't work for me. Normally this more human-focused lens would strike all the right chords so I'm not sure what I'm missing, though maybe I'll revisit it for the sci-fi project and see the light.

[bamwc2]

MrSheldrake and therewillbeblus, I'm sorry to hear that you didn't get much out of The Vast of Night. I watched it last night and, while there was too much stage setting and uninteresting dialogue in the first ten minutes or so, once the alien plot kicked in, I found it to be one of the most effective and creepy examples of its genre in a long time.

[therewillbeblus]

You're definitely in the majority, it seems to be universally lauded

[senseabove]

I'm similarly baffled by this getting praise. It felt like an elongated example of just about everything that's middling in prestige TV: highly stylized cinematography, elaborate costume and set design, and overt formality wedded to thin ideas, a few gotchas, and a few Points, but utterly lacking any humanity, emotion, or engagement with the realities of the Points it scores. Sure, yes, anybody who is not a married white man is more likely to be disbelieved and discredited in 1950s America. Sure, the destination of that memorable long tracking shot is, we find out later, Significant, when it is very specifically explained in a pointedly monologic monologue.

I admit I'm only half a season into the Twilight Zone, but the "Paradox Theater" reference seems to completely miss that the Twilight Zone is usually working, with varying degrees of success, from or toward a paradox, like "what if you had eternal life and then got a life sentence to prison" or "what if you miraculously regained a skill you lost and it inexorably led you to sacrifice that skill again," whereas this is just "What if aliens? The Roswell kind. That's it. Maybe they're also the Illuminati, but otherwise... yeah, just aliens."

[TheKieslowskiHaze]

I liked Vast of Night quite a bit, thought it was a perfectly fun genre exercise.

Sometimes, if I can't sleep, I turn on the local conservative radio station, which goes full-blown conspiracy theory between 1am-5am. I don't actually believe in UFOs, but I am kind-of obsessed with them as an American mythology and phenomenon. I can't tell if the radio hosts who do that kind of stuff are true believers or just great performance artists. Maybe a bit of both? Either way, I find it fascinating.

I thought Vast of Night's focus on radio, and on long stretches of people simply telling the stories of UFOs, did justice to that medium and mythos. It harkens back to Orson Welles' famous War of the Worlds broadcast, and it is creepier for it.

[barryconvex]

I think senseabove really nailed a lot of what didn't work with the film in his second paragraph but I still liked it. Mostly because the two leads are so appealing, especially Sierra McCormick. It's not trying to be anything more than what it is- a perfectly fun genre exercise as TheKieslowskiHaze put it.