Eleştirmen yorumları

Economically directed by Benjamin Brewer with a welcome performance by a rare, understated Nicolas Cage, and carefully written by his manager, Mike Nilon... Arcadian is satisfying entertainment; it’s a cut above most Nicolas Cage thrillers.

Director Ben Brewer (a VFX veteran from Everything Everywhere All At Once and his brother Alex (in charge of 3D creature design and modeling) have evolved possibly the most innovative monster design since the man-deer-god chimera of The Ritual, an almost cartoonish mixture of impossible joints and teeth.

“Nicolas Cage tries to raise teenagers at the end of the world” has potential as a premise, even if it doesn’t sound radically innovative. Arcadian sidelines Cage too often, though, and finds nothing as appealing or energetic to replace him with.

A competent director can do only so much with a poor script, and “Arcadian” is littered with shortcuts and screenwriting clichés. It is vague to the point of careless, and often seems to be inventing rules for its monsters as it goes along.

When the sun is up, [Arcadian is] an intimate family drama featuring a trio of strong performances and a script that never says more than it has to. And when the sun goes down, it turns into a strikingly effective creature feature, starring some of the most inventively designed and viscerally realized monsters to scuttle across the screen in some time.

A noisy, inelegant knockoff of “A Quiet Place"... Unfortunately, Brewer and screenwriter Mike Nilon ignored an essential rule: Conceiving an original monster isn’t nearly as important as coming up with compelling human characters.

[Arcadian] is a thinly-drawn film that cares more about the entertainment value of its indelibly designed creatures than its human characters. Such a myopic focus would normally be a bad sign but here, with terrifying specters capable of scaring the daylights out of audiences, you can’t help but be swept up by the skin-crawling vision projected by the film.

Alternating between terror and sentimentality until its final moments, “Arcadian” is another solid addition to Cage’s genre filmography. What starts as a simple survival story finds its footing as a nuanced exploration of the value of safety and security and the moments when we decide it’s worth giving up.

An effective creature feature that avoids a lot of the traps of post-apocalyptic horror... and delivers on its premise... “Arcadian” is one of the better entries in this growing genre about how screwed we all are.

What's clear in Arcadia is that Brewer... is an assured director... Even as [the film] struggles to find its footing, it's capable of landing some knockout moments.