Khoi Vinh’s review published on Letterboxd:
Okay if you’re reading this, I don’t want you to freak out, but this is my first time watching this—ever. I don’t know how I never once got an opportunity to see it lo these many years, but I finally corrected that—in May of 2024!
At first I was really digging the old, 70s Spielberg style that brought a naturalistic shooting style and captured beautifully spontaneous, overlapping dialogue. That and the early scenes that jump all over the globe with a minimum of exposition, setting the wider context of the world in a style reminiscent of William Friedkin—I dug it!
Somewhere along the way though, that New Hollywood sensibility transforms into the precise and manipulative Spielberg style of the 80s and 90s,. That style is less naturalistic but rather realer than real, and it’s often left me cold. My heart sank when I realized this transformation was happening, and then I realized why it was necessary: the second half of the film is almost all about special effects, awe-inspiring sets and a barrage of beautiful lighting design, and by definition they need to be more manipulative. The story also takes a turn for the worse here; the more desperate Richard Dreyfus’s character got, the less interested I became, which really is the inverse of what should have happened. The final resolution is…it’s kind of dumb, but it also feels very unearned and poorly explained. By that point all that really mattered is the production design which, I have to admit, still looks great today.
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