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The Conversation Movie Review

The Conversation is a 1974 mystery thriller film directed by Francis Ford Coppola and starring Gene Hackman. It’s another frustrating, overrated Francis Ford Coppola movie.

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“He’d kill us if he got the chance“

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A paranoid, secretive surveillance expert has a crisis of conscience when he suspects that the couple he is spying on will be murdered. First off, I am not a fan of Coppola’s movies. I find them to be very much of their time and not nearly as engaging or as well crafted as most would evaluate them to be. This is yet another one of his movies that did not appeal to me in the slightest and for numerous reasons.

One is its tone and pacing. I do realize that he was going for a purposely cold and dispassionate tone, but what that led to is a movie that felt difficult to connect to. It’s one of the slowest-paced movies of its decade and of all time. First time I watched this film over a decade ago I fell asleep and I couldn’t even finish it. Watching it again after all this time, I still barely managed to get through the finish line. This is how painfully slow, tedious and unexciting this movie is.

Needless to say, it fails spectacularly as a thriller. Thrillers are supposed to, well, thrill you to the core. This movie, however, only manages to bore you to tears as you wait for it to end and put you out of your misery. It’s one of the most annoying movies tonally and in pacing that I’ve ever seen.

Gene Hackman did a very good job in the role of Harry. He is a person who is very different in real life from this reserved, overly serious man that he’s playing here, so he deserves credit for actually delivering a strong performance in such an atypical role for him. Others are all fleeting presences in a film that is cluttered with characters, but the vast majority of them were entirely insignificant to the story and/or frustratingly underdeveloped.

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The Conversation is all about the dangers of constant surveillance and in that subject it was quite ahead of its time. How the technology was used here and how the movie explored inhumanity through technology was interesting, but much more could and should have been done with this admittedly excellent premise. The movie never fully developed its themes, which really annoyed me. The sound is excellent for sure and the editing is at times unique, but the cinematography is plain and cheap-looking, which was the point, but it did lead to a movie that is boring not just in plot, but also in visuals.