At the very beginning, the advantages are striking:
- Very beautiful and unusual visual effects with the camera approaching from space, with drawings in the air. That’s great, especially since the movie only has a budget of $30 million.
- The film hides how tired of the movie voiceovers of the author.
- Close to the beginning there is an interesting theatrical dialogue between the two women. You know what's special about that? Most movies don't pass the simplest test - Is there a scene where two women talk about something other than men? I mean, most movies just don’t have that kind of dialogue, because women are seen as sexual objects (or at least love). And here are two cool aunts grinding for life.
After these details, I knew the film was worth it.
In general, the strength of the film is how everything is filmed and played, great interesting characters, including the clerk, who is essentially extremely ordinary, but his mediocrity is presented beautifully. In the middle, there’s a scene with the most ridiculous seduction I’ve ever seen, and yet if you put it to life, it might actually work (if a woman likes you before).
But the weak side is the last third of the film, which does not stretch the bar and reduces the almost mystical concept to stupidity. Let’s see what’s going on there. The character and the writer have already found each other, found out that the life of a real person is at stake, and... what are they doing? The only possible response here is to prevent it. There is a very easy way out of the situation - to change the character's name and some biographical details, thus disconnecting him from the real person. But instead, everyone decides that the book is so good that you have to die for it, not the author, but an outsider. What's so brilliant about her? The film makes it interesting that the events of the book intersected with the life of the author, but this was not in her book. In her plot was a long boring description of the taxman, his short love story and clawed death, which is in every third film. It sucks, not a book, I wouldn’t read it. However, this is an eternal problem of nested works: when a film or book mentions another fictional film or book, they are always very, very bad, because otherwise the author needs to think through two works instead of one, and laziness.