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- Hey guys,
welcome back to the channel.
This is Gregory Martin,
aka the Super Producer,
and we're back with another video.
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And with that being said,
let's just jump right into today's review,
and today we're reviewing
the movie "Vivarium".
So I actually watched this movie,
I wanna say, about a month ago.
And my initial reaction
after watching the movie
was (beep) this movie.
But I watched the movie again,
and it's still (beep) this movie,
but I think at least now
I feel comfortable enough
where I've let it digest
where I can at least give a review on it.
So vivarium in Latin
literally means place of life,
and is an enclosed area
where plants and animals are raised
for observation and research.
So the title "Vivarium"
is dead on for this film.
The film is about this young couple
who is searching for the perfect home
and end up trapped in this mysterious,
labyrinth-type neighborhood.
The young couple, Tom and Jemma,
are portrayed by actors Jesse
Eisenberg and Imogen Poots,
and they seem to have
a great relationship.
She's a teacher, and he is a landscaper.
Like I said before,
the couple is looking for a home,
and they come across a real estate agent
who shows them this new
neighborhood that is called Yonder.
But watching this real estate agent
in the first few minutes,
you realize that there's
something off about him.
And the couple notices that he seems off,
but like any good horror film,
the couple ignores the signs
and they get in the car and
follow this guy to Yonder.
When I say the houses look the same,
the houses look exactly the same.
When they get to the house,
they see how plain, how
sterile the house is.
They then realize that
the real estate agent
has actually left the property.
He's nowhere to be found, his car is gone,
and so they leave,
or they try to leave.
But mysteriously, every turn,
every street looks the same,
and they notice that they keep passing by
the house that they were shown
over and over and over and over again.
And as an audience member,
that's when you really see, like,
okay, there's something going on here.
What's gonna happen next?
So the next day, after they've tried
to get someone's attention,
they have the bright idea
to burn the house down.
They wake up the next day
and the house is rebuilt.
And the kicker is they find a
box in the middle of the road,
and inside the box is a infant.
There's a message in the box that says,
"Raise this baby and we will release you."
Like, I have no idea why they
were so calm in this scene.
If that were me, I would've been like,
nope, and left that baby
right in the street (laughs),
like, good luck, good luck little kid.
But this is a movie,
and we all know that that didn't happen.
They start to raise the baby,
that's where the movie gets even freakier.
The baby, in less than four months,
turns into a pre-adolescent
boy outta nowhere,
and the way that he acts is very peculiar,
because he starts to mock and mimic
the mannerisms of the couple,
the way that they speak,
the way that they are
interacting with each other.
Just overall, it seems like
he's just watching them
at every turn,
like, everything that they do,
he's studying them.
It's creepy.
And over the course of the film,
we see the effect raising this kid
has had on this couple.
They go from being very loving
to being very standoffish.
Jemma tries to keep everything light
in lieu of everything that's happening,
but Tom becomes obsessed
with trying to get out the situation.
Tom, most of the movie, spends his time
digging into the ground,
trying to get to the bottom
of this artificial substance,
while, on the other hand,
Jemma continues to
reluctantly care for this boy,
because there's something intriguing.
She just kind of gets swept up
in the whole motherhood thing.
But there's various places during the film
where we see her snap back
into the reality of her situation.
One day the boy disappears
and comes home with a book.
And when she looks at the book,
she sees these alien-like
writings and figures.
And what really is the kicker
is when she asks the boy where he went
and who did he see,
and because he imitates everything,
she asks him to imitate the
person that he saw, and,
his neck just turns into to big balls
and he just starts emanating sounds
from the balls on his neck,
and that's when she realizes, okay,
this is truly an alien.
And then cut to the next scene,
he's like a young adult.
Within six months, this kid has grown
from a baby to a damn near young adult.
And what's really troubling
is that when we see him as an adult,
he looks very similar
to the real estate agent
that the couple had met in
the beginning of the film.
And not to give everything away,
Tom and Jemma get exhausted
to the point of death,
and the alien discards both of 'em,
and dumped into the hole that, ironically,
Tom has been digging the entire movie.
I will say, after watching
this for the second time,
I enjoyed the story a little bit more.
I think my biggest issue with the movie
when I first saw it
was that if this is gonna be the couple's
prison or purgatory,
that I at least see it coming,
because some weird way,
and maybe that was just more me,
I always felt hopeful
that they were going to figure out a way
to get out of the situation.
I figured there's gonna
be a reveal at the end,
that obviously these are aliens,
and there's gonna be a way
to disrupt their master plan,
or that the couple at least
was going to acknowledge
that this is an alien kid,
and what do you have to
lose by just killing it?
I have no idea why
the idea of really
trying to kill the kid
didn't happen 'til it was an adult,
which was going to be impossible.
Why didn't you just kill this
kid when you had the chance?
And that just frustrated
the hell out of me.
The other thing that i
really liked that I caught
the second time around
was just the symbolism
and some of the ironies that
were prevalent in the film.
Like I said earlier, Tom
digging in the ground,
trying to get to the bottom of everything,
so it could be saying,
like he was also digging his own grave.
And even in the opening scene
where they showed the cuckoo,
I forgot that cuckoos have
a parasitic nature to them.
Their mothers lay their
eggs in other birds' nests,
and what the cuckoo does
is discards all of the other eggs
so that the mother who is the host
actually feeds the cuckoo,
who grows much quicker than
usually the other birds.
So they definitely drew a
parallel there as well in the film
where a mother and a father
are forced to care for this alien kid,
show him the ways of society
so that he blends in,
to the point where he
grows stronger then them,
and they are rendered defenseless.
Even though I understood it,
I was still upset with this film,
but I got to give the director a pass
'cause I do think he delivered
on what he was trying to get across.
Well that was my review on "Vivarium".
It's a very frustrating movie,
and I feel that a lot of people felt
it was frustrating as well,
or they just didn't like it,
because all of the
critics and the metadata,
your Rotten Tomatoes,
gave it a very middling scores.
Because once you figure
out what's happening,
it's like why don't the characters know?
It's so blatantly obvious,
and it was such a
head-scratching ordeal for me.
That's why I didn't review it a month ago.
I hope you enjoyed this
review and found it helpful.
If you did, please leave
comments down below.
As always, don't forget
to hit that thumbs up
and subscribe to the channel,
and I will see you guys on the next one.
Peace.
