The Giant: Incoherently, Pretentiously Empty

My subconscious learned a lesson today while watching David RaBoy's The Giant, and that lesson was that your movie isn't automatically good just because it looks like an indie folk music video. Truth be told, I wanted to watch and review something more obscure for a change, and though there are some undeniably beautiful independent gems out there, there are some real pieces of coal to be found as well, The Giant being one of them. This movie is an incoherent mess, one that wants to be contemplative without bothering to come up with anything worth contemplating. It's also visually stunning, which is little consolation for me, though job offers for the visual department of this movie would be right to start flooding in for director of photography Eric Yue and whoever else oversaw the cinematography. It's a shame that such a wonderful visual aesthetic went in to a story so barebones that I wondered at points why anyone had bothered telling it. To clue you in on what little the movie is about, The Giant follows a mommy-issues-plagued high schooler named Charlotte as she navigates a tumultuos graduation in her small Georgia town as some mysterious murders mar the headlines of the area. On paper, that admittedly sounds like a really promising premise. However, The Giant quickly reveals itself to be a meditation that can't think of anything worthwhile to meditate on.

Now, on the upside, what was immediately clear to me was that the 35 mm film stock used to shoot The Giant, combined with the skill of Yue and Co. gives us an old-school and visually vibrant image that finds a lot of character in the frame. However, this is in many ways the only good thing to say about this movie, and I utilize no hyperbole when I say this, as narratively, most of the story beats in The Giant are too indefinite to accomplish much of anything. I'm fine with an ambiguous and vague ending to a movie. I'm even fine with being told to fear or like or be sad about something without being told why. In the case of this movie, I was never so much as suggested what to think or feel about anything, and both the narrative and emotional beats of this movie meandered to absolutely no end, never giving me any reason to feel much of anything at all while obviously still trying.

That said, I despised the constant attempted deepness of this movie. The Giant doesn't understand that emotional payoffs need to be used sparingly, and neither does it trust it's tone to uphold it throughout necessary slower seasons it seems to think of as dry spells to be avoided at all costs. It tries to feel deep so often that it never quite escapes being shallow, and commits to its serious tone without really having any compelling reason to do so. Even worse, it tries to act as a character study without bothering to conjure up any tangible or personal depth to explore within it's characters. The Giant is trying to be meditative without bothering to come up with anything worthwhile to meditate on, and so it meanders on and on to the point where I was wondering when the whole ordeal would decide to put an end to it's seemingly-endless one-dimensionality and roll credits. This movie waltzes through pretty imagery without intent and then leans on exposition-saturated dialogue whenever it's own story demands so much as anything of it.

Lastly, I hated this movie's eventual descent into mythology. There was no development toward a plot point as unceremoniously presented and unwarranted as this one, a last-minute attempt to try and make the movie's name make any sort of sense. The Giant offers a lot of unwanted answers without bothering to ask questions in the first place, and would have been way better off axing this aspect entirely and turning it's title into some sort of bad metaphor instead.

The Giant is an hour-forty of meditation on absolutely nothing, the type of movie that thinks it's way better than it actually is. Do I feel a bit dirty knocking a small independent flick like this one that's obviously trying to say something meaningful? Yes. Yes, I do. But in others, I can't bring myself to be partial. Granted, it can't be said that the movie's visuals are underbaked. Remember when I mentioned cinematographer Eric Yue at the start of this review? He actually went on to be the director of photography for A24's I Saw The TV Glow, and he and whoever else was in charge of the visuals for The Giant absolutely deserve to get some phone calls, job offers, and invites. But nevertheless, this movie can't seem to do anything interesting with itself, or much of anything at all for that matter. The Giant isn't quite unlike a beautifully-wrapped present with nothing inside.

The Giant - 3/10

Deuteronomy 24:16