From the very beginning until the end, Ben X wasn’t as impressive to me as it was praised by many of its audience. Watching it,
I was never able to fully understand the message it tried to deliver but was distracted by its overly complicated structure and unclear description of the events. At
the end, even worse, I was so confused about the story of the movie that I had to revisit
Wikipedia to figure out what really happened. This certainly means that there’s
something wrong with movie, unless the director intended to put such riddle
inside-this movie simply lacks clarification. Hence, in this
review, I would like to talk about what I didn’t like about the movie, Ben X.
The first problem I would like to criticize is that the movie never lets its audience to understand Ben. What you know
about Ben after watching the movie is that he has autism, sees
visions, hears voices, plays game, and commits fake suicide. What else? You simply know his actions but cannot understand his emotional struggle which he must have felt while fighting against the world. The movie, though continuously
trying to highlight Ben’s emotional insecurity and the desire to suicide, simply
does not allow its viewers to take time to sympathize with him. Most of the
time, the movie only shows what Ben does, not how he feels. That certainly isn’t
what the audience would want; rather they would want to understand Ben and be
like him at least during the movie. Because of this problem, Ben X couldn’t
achieve its goal.
Also, the
movie tries to deal with too many issues such as, autism, bullying, games, etc.
only to fail to elaborate in any of them. Ben X tries to show how ill an autism
patient can be, how he or she is socially discriminated by others, why he or
she has to turn to online role-playing games to feel free and proud at least in
a cyber space, and the like. If it succeeded in achieving all its aims, I think
it should be awarded with all the grand prizes of major international film festivals;
however, it didn’t-no couldn't. The movie certainly needed to concentrate on one of the
issues if it really wanted its audience to at least feel something from it.
