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Blowup Movie Review

Blowup is a 1966 mystery thriller film directed by Michelangelo Antonioni. It’s the director’s typically pretentious, slow and overrated movie.

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“Nothing like a little disaster for sorting things out“

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A fashion photographer unknowingly captures a death on film after following two lovers in a park. Wow, is this premise awesome or what? It’s ripe for great thrills and a terrific examination of the relationship between technology and crime. Blowup the movie almost gives us nothing of that. It was a total waste of potential that frustrated me deeply watching it as I could see a truly incredible movie had it been directed in a more commercial manner.

As is the case with most of this director’s opus, the film is overly dragging to the point of becoming quite a tedious watch. You can have a slow pace, but imbue the scenes with some poignancy or importance. Here however, many sequences were a pointless buying of time – uninteresting, repetitive and even detourish in their quality.

Whenever it focused on the actual photography as its main theme, it worked. In no small part, this photographic element worked due to the tremendous quality of the movie’s cinematography, which is very artistic and giving you an eerie sense of danger and suspense. The score complemented that feel also very strikingly. The film’s atmosphere is one ripe for fantastic thriller scenes, but what we ended up with is a film with atmosphere, but no resolution, no pay-off, and thus no possible engagement for modern viewers.

Well, you can be riveted by Blowup if you are a pretentious reviewer, but for us regular moviegoing folk, this just doesn’t cut it. The characterization is also quite bad and the worst part of the movie in my opinion. Thomas is entirely underutilized and David Hemmings did not give a strong performance whatsoever. The women are also utterly forgettable.

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The more existentialist meanings given to the movie are mostly made-up and hold no water. The actual film has some interesting themes about reality, technology and the feelings of being alive or dead inside, but it mostly doesn’t do a good job exploring them due to weak characterization and horrible pacing. At the end of the day, the first half was intriguing, but the rest was a waste.