The Wall (2013)

What happens when you are a denizen of the modern world and you are cast into the more primitive world? And alone? How do you cope? How do you survive? How do you tell the story, even though you have no idea whether others will hear the story? This is a walk through the human mind. An excellent story. Watch it.

The premise behind THE WALL, a German art-house movie, is a familiar one: an invisible barrier suddenly appears, trapping a woman (and her dog) in a rural valley, where she must learn to fend for herself against the elements and the dangers her new-found situation brings. This idea is nothing new, having been explored - at length - in Stephen King's UNDER THE DOME, and I actually explored it myself in a high school horror story I wrote back in the 1990s.Unfortunately the execution of THE WALL turns out to be lacking, failing to effectively exploit the narrative scenarios that such a barrier would give rise to. Don't get me wrong, there are some chilling and effective scenes here, but 90% of the film seems to consist of the protagonist moping around and feeling sorry for herself.A ponderous, often monotonous, narration does little to help things. You can't fault the acting here, and the cinematography is the best thing in it, really bringing out the isolation of the rural valley setting. But the character is uninteresting and the bizarre time frame, which jumps all over the place as the film progresses, is just confusing. Not so much I AM LEGEND as I AM DULL AND NOT AS GOOD AS I THINK I AM.

The protagonist finds herself in an unexplained silent disaster and in complete isolation which immediately intrigues. Particularly since it plays in the right-there. There is no reminiscing about the past, her background, people she knows.Although she makes some effort to find out more about this invisible wall the story zeros in on her sole surviving and loneliness. I was completely sucked in to the narration, the beautiful scenery and the phenomenal acting. The performance is stunning and breathtakingly intense. This one I have to see a few more times just to get the complete gist of it. Beautiful! I wonder though if there is any significance to the radio channel playing in the beginning, the language is undetectable. Maybe it was done to intensify the sense of alienation.

Movies are art, some good & some bad. This abstract movie is bad art in my opinion & it's more like a Yoko Ono, Jackson Pollock, or poop on a canvas as opposed to a John Lennon, Salvador Dalí, or art done with some skill. To the average person this movie is just a lame medium-high budget movie with no beginning or end. The smug artsy-fartsy crowd like this movie because it strokes the ego to know it has a hidden meaning, but the hidden meaning of this film does not uplift mankind like a They Live (1988). It has the same lame, apathetic, give up & go along hidden meaning of the junk film Larry Crowne (2011). Symbolism explained: Apathetic woman doesn't want to know why she is trapped in a big bubble so she keeps the animals she finds around her in a little bubble to give her inauthentic life meaning, the end. "How you like them apples."