This would be the film I paused reading Warbreaker by Brandon Sanderson to watch at approximately 20 minute breakpoints before continuing to read Sanderson’s snoozefest of a book, Warbreaker. For some reason, reading a Sanderson novel just put me in the mood to watch a porn flick. I can’t explain quite why, but after noticing a video bashing this film on Youtube, I decided to just watch it.

The acting by all the actors is excellent; I think the voice work is getting a wrongful rap because none of them seem to speak English as their primary language. Honestly, we American savages should be more courteous of people who make an active effort to learn the English language. It’s so terrible how ethnic minorities continue to face discrimination for their voices when Americans perceive them to be morally objectionable. The amount of privilege that goes into such insults is disgusting. Anyway, the acting was excellent, the lighting, most of the story, the dialogue, and the romp scenes were all excellently done. Now, with all that out of the way . . . the music breakpoints throughout the film were overdone, annoying, and obnoxious. I’m tired of scenes cutting across events with bland music overlays. It’s boring . . . except during one scene involving a sexual romp on a boat, but apart from that, it is boring.

As for the content of the characters, plot, and sex scenes . . . so, on the one hand, I can see this just playing on an illusory fantasy for both women and men who believe in the alpha male stereotype (the lead character even describes the male love interest as an alpha male to a friend late in the film), a sexual power fantasy for men (particularly during the scene where he chains the lead female character to his bed to make her watch as another woman goes down on him), and possibly a rape fantasy for women who see the film for what it is: a piece of fiction with a situation they would never advocate for in real life. That being said, the negative disparagement by people who hate the film for treating the woman’s consent as an object of villainy is justified. It is true that the man forcing her to his whims and ordering her to behave after kidnapping her is given a positive light . . . and I can’t begrudge people for harshly criticizing that. I do think that it’s just a stupid plot set-up that ended-up being presented with a veneer of realism, maturity, and seriousness that it doesn’t deserve. The screenplay writers seem to mainly be writers of erotic fiction and it is by two women and two men, so I think they purposefully strove to make a rape fantasy film for both women and men who share that taboo kink. I actually don’t; I just really needed something controversial to watch with how boring, sterile, and dumb reading Warbreaker by Sanderson was; it is still taking long to slog through. I know that must sound absolutely stupid and ridiculous, but I don’t think I can ever quite describe the sheer boredom I feel when reading the Vivienne and Lightsong chapters that I just needed something mindless that focuses on subjects Sanderson never writes about to keep from being overwhelmed with boredom.

All that aside, the lead male character seems like a total incel fantasy to me. The guy seems to be able to acquire any girl he wants, he makes the woman of his dreams jealous by getting another woman to blow him in front of her, and has a jealous ex-wife who wants his cock for herself and so on. It just felt like something an incel would write. Anyhow, I don’t know what to rate it, as I had varied expectations. The ending is terrible, but so is the entire situation the lead female character goes through and I can understand people being pissed that this seems to romanticize rape and Stockholm syndrome. To me, it’s just some smutty fictional film and watching it isn’t the same as advocating for its contents. That being said, it’s nowhere near as good as the excellent LGBT relationship film from South Korea, the Handmaiden (currently available on Amazon Prime as of this writing, go watch it, excellent film). But it’ll help with getting through a few chapters of Brandon Sanderson’s Warbreaker.