why do all of rian johnson's films feel like a really great premise that gets several layers of obnoxious reddit-esque self-reflexive pretense smothered on top of it that's explicitly designed to flatter the audience into thinking they're watching something more intelligent than they actually are.

yeah, i'm still not really convinced at all concerning johnson's merits tbh. the cast (especially daniel craig & chris evans) is wasted here on performing ridiculous caricatures so that johnson's muted centrist american political points can be thrown at the audience as being dangerous & subversive when in actuality the writing here isn't too far from the opinions of what you'd find your naive democrat-supporting uncle who loves martin luther king jr. but thinks malcolm x "went to far" would say. the worst aspect of this pithy politics is that the "marxist" character of the film basically gets played out as a traitor to immigrant interests. when fucking michael bay has more nuanced political expressions in his overblown action films than you do in a bourgeois-focused murder mystery, i think that's a damning indictment.

what bugs me most of all is how self-satisfied it appears, and how convinced of its own shallow styling it is. i'm not particularly pissed off because it's way too up its own ass to attempt to be vile or daring, but i have no desire to ever watch this again. i get why people like this sort of thing, and that's what worries me, i feel like johnson is continually doing a series of magician's hat tricks without any actual magic contingency or dynamism coming into his films.