Parasite| Review
Updated: May 31, 2022
I'm at a crossroads on how I feel about this film. I can't really figure out if I like it, or not. One thing that I am assured of is that this film is heavily overrated. The highest-rated film on letterboxd? This film doesn't even come close to the second-highest-rated film, The Godfather, on a quality scale.
I can literally count the number of flaws on my fingers. For example, why did the man downstairs decide to come up the one day there was a birthday party, wouldn't he hear from his wife that there was a party going on? When Ki-taek was going into the basement to hide he would've walked over his dying son, knowing the personality type of this man based on the screenplay, this action would not have been justified. Now I understand that some people may assume that I am "nitpicking" the story, but a film with this level of praise should be able to be picked apart and still come out with no flaws.
The message is so hand fisted every moment that it comes to the point where it basically isn't even a hidden message anymore and frankly starts to become annoying.Bong Joon-ho doesn't challenge the viewer in any such way and doesn't embrace any technical aspects. It is quite literally a stereotypical South Korean blockbuster. If you really do examine the tropes in the film, they aren't even original. If you actually watch films from South Korea and thoroughly examine them, Parasite comes out to be barely original. The idea of the story has already been done before. It quite literally copies the main story of Metropolis(1927), the poor overtaking the rich.
Why do I even care about this family in the first place? Because they're poor? The old maid was also poor but I wasn't supposed to even sympathize with her in the first place. Her husband literally lives in a nuclear fall-out, but no, these random people who live in a house just merely below the ground are the ones I should care about. The story is as if Bong-Joon Ho created an entire film in two minutes.
Overall, don't watch Parasite, it's just a waste of time when you could be watching a much better film.
Time Stamp: January 24, 2020