{"id":3267,"date":"2022-11-15T15:00:41","date_gmt":"2022-11-15T22:00:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/?p=3267"},"modified":"2022-10-27T21:19:47","modified_gmt":"2022-10-28T03:19:47","slug":"movie-enemy-2013","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/2022\/11\/15\/movie-enemy-2013\/","title":{"rendered":"MOVIE: Enemy (2013)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong><u><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft size-medium\" src=\"https:\/\/upload.wikimedia.org\/wikipedia\/en\/thumb\/0\/0d\/Enemy_poster.jpg\/220px-Enemy_poster.jpg\" alt=\"Enemy\" width=\"220\" height=\"311\">Enemy<\/u><\/strong><br>\nYear: 2013<br>\nRating: R<br>\nLength: 91 minutes \/ 1.52 hours<\/p>\n<p>My first introduction to Denis Villeneuve was <em>Prisoners<\/em> (2013). This was an intense film, but even after seeing <em>Sicario<\/em> (2015), I didn&#8217;t get hooked on his directing until <a href=\"http:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/2017\/03\/14\/movie-arrival-2016\/\"><em>Arrival<\/em><\/a> (2016). What&#8217;s interesting is that another Villeneuve film from 2013 evaded my radar until now. My film-loving friends made me aware of <em>Enemy<\/em> (2013), but I didn&#8217;t get around to watching it until now. I&#8217;m glad I did. Seeing Villeneuve in the early stages of defining his style is fascinating, and <em>Enemy<\/em> certainly is more stylistic than <em>Prisoners<\/em> ever was, even if it felt like a student film at times.<\/p>\n<p>Of course, being one of Villeneuve&#8217;s earlier films, <em>Enemy<\/em> has some rough edges. It&#8217;s difficult to tell whether the source material influenced some of this film&#8217;s weird choices, but it&#8217;s the one thing that really prevents me from giving it a perfect score. Maybe cutting out the spider bits would have made <em>Enemy<\/em> more cohesive, but then it might have suffered from being almost too generic. The shocking ending definitely places it up there in the list of all-time &#8220;WTF&#8221; cinematic moments. Was it necessary? It&#8217;s hard to tell. Was it memorable? Absolutely.<\/p>\n<p>With such a small cast of characters, <em>Enemy<\/em>&#8216;s success is not entirely because of Denis Villeneuve&#8217;s directing. Jake Gyllenhaal practically carries this movie&#8230;twice. His portrayal of two drastically different characters who look alike is part of the charm of this movie. It&#8217;s almost a modern interpretation of &#8220;The Prince and the Pauper,&#8221; but with enough tweaks to make it feel original. Of course, the two love interests of Gyllenhaal&#8217;s characters sold this movie for me. M\u00e9lanie Laurent was great, but Sarah Gadon&#8217;s performance as the wife of a movie star who &#8220;traded up&#8221; was so smartly done.<\/p>\n<p>Early Villeneuve style with a few odd plot choices, I give <em>Enemy<\/em> 4.0 stars out of 5.<\/p>\n<h2><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone wp-image-647\" src=\"http:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/10\/255px-Five-pointed_star_svg-150x150.png\" alt=\"255px-Five-pointed_star_svg\" width=\"50\" height=\"50\">&nbsp;<strong><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone wp-image-647\" src=\"http:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/10\/255px-Five-pointed_star_svg-150x150.png\" alt=\"255px-Five-pointed_star_svg\" width=\"50\" height=\"50\">&nbsp;<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone wp-image-647\" src=\"http:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/10\/255px-Five-pointed_star_svg-150x150.png\" alt=\"255px-Five-pointed_star_svg\" width=\"50\" height=\"50\">&nbsp;<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone wp-image-647\" src=\"http:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/10\/255px-Five-pointed_star_svg-150x150.png\" alt=\"255px-Five-pointed_star_svg\" width=\"50\" height=\"50\"><\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><a href=\"http:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/bmw-the-critic\/\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"820\" height=\"312\" src=\"http:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/02\/BMW-the-Critic-v2.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2968\" srcset=\"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/02\/BMW-the-Critic-v2.jpg 820w, https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/02\/BMW-the-Critic-v2-300x114.jpg 300w, https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/02\/BMW-the-Critic-v2-768x292.jpg 768w, https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/02\/BMW-the-Critic-v2-640x244.jpg 640w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 820px) 100vw, 820px\" \/><\/a><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Enemy Year: 2013 Rating: R Length: 91 minutes \/ 1.52 hours My first introduction to Denis Villeneuve was Prisoners (2013). This was an intense film, but even after seeing Sicario (2015), I didn&#8217;t get hooked on his directing until Arrival (2016). What&#8217;s interesting is that another Villeneuve film from 2013 evaded my radar until now. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,2],"tags":[121,421,3209,3210,13,1114,8],"class_list":["post-3267","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-4-0-stars","category-movie","tag-121","tag-denis-villeneuve","tag-enemy","tag-jake-gyllenhaal","tag-movie","tag-psychological","tag-review"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3267","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3267"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3267\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3272,"href":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3267\/revisions\/3272"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3267"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3267"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3267"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}