The Sea of Trees: It's Awful, Awful, Awful

Gus Van Sant's The Sea of Trees should be inducted into some manner of cinematic hall of fame, and not for good reasons. This mystery thriller from A24 is a failure on nearly every level, and while that may sound like increasingly familiar hyperbole to you, you're just going to have to trust me on this one. You'll have to watch the movie yourself to believe its level of ineptitude, and as someone who just finished it, saying that feels a lot like saying you're going to have to stick your hand in the garbage disposal to know that it hurts.

The Sea of Trees tries its best to be a methodical and contemplative movie, so it's a shame that its attempted exploration of Matthew McConaughey's Arthur, a man considering taking his own life in Japan's infamous Aokigahara Forest, methodically and contemplatively goes absolutely nowhere. Watching this movie feels not entirely unlike attending an uncomfortably dull meet-and-greet where the person you're supposed to be meeting and greeting sits and stares at you with a blank, vaguely sad expression on their face. I can't imagine that the term meet-and-greet excites you too much, and neither do I think you will be thrilled by this movie's nearly nonexistent narrative.

The Sea of Trees accomplishes almost nothing with its two-pronged story, one arc featuring a journey through an admittedly well-shot forest with no clear destination in mind, and the other consisting of a series of redundant flashbacks about as necessary as an industrial fan in a tornado. It's a shame that The Sea of Trees contains some of the ingredients needed to make a good movie, but refuses to cook with them in any measurable way.

Needlessly complicating matters is this movie's needless habit of non-sequential storytelling. The Sea of Trees even displays pay-offs before we've gotten to see their set-up in the first place, which is kind of like a villain redundantly and even ridiculously threatening to kill the hero's friends after they're already dead. Much of its latter half flows about as smoothly as a river of peanut butter, falling prey to lazy, forced, and contrived filmmaking of the worst kind, the type where people fall off cliffs because the writer either needed them to or was too inept to craft any development. The latter sounds likelier to me.

The Sea of Trees was a thoroughly unpleasant movie, and not in a good way that allowed me to laugh a little. It's a story without any structure, a melodrama without a hint of emotional intelligence, and a character study with characters lacking any semblance of personality to be discovered. It doesn't even have the decency to be so bad that it's good, and so it aimlessly ambles from one self-serious, shallow, and substance-less scenario to the next without a hint of urgency like some drunk, half-rate philosopher with no grasp of the concept of a story. True one-star movies are rare - exotic, even - but some movies come closer to the line than others.

Let's hear it for movies that give future generations great examples of how not to make one.

The Sea of Trees - 2/10

Psalm 34:17-20