The Post (2017)
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The Post Movie Review
The Post is a 2017 historical film directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks. It’s such a bland, extremely boring movie.
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“News is the first rough draft of history“
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The film has an important subject matter and it deals with an essential event in American history and especially politics and journalism. But the film never makes use of its story well and Spielberg never made it entertaining or exciting in any way.
What we get is one incredibly dull historical drama which goes from one boring conversation to another and is filled with a high amount of on-the-nose, simplistic dialogue that is lacking in nuance. It is one of the most tedious films of the year as it bored me almost to sleep.
The characters are also highly uninteresting and only Graham and Bradlee are memorable of course, but even they aren’t all that well developed. As for the acting, naturally both Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks give reliably strong performances. However, he is somewhat subdued and underutilized whereas she basically plays herself. She did pull off those emotional scenes really well, but there’s nothing that she does here that she hasn’t already done before.
The film relies so much on its stars that it was obvious how it was made to bring an Oscar nomination to Streep particularly and it did that of course as the Academy just could not resist giving the nod to her. And in a weaker year, maybe she would deserve it, but in a year full of great female performances, her nomination simply is a travesty.
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The Post has its moving scenes with the third act being particularly emotional and engaging. I really liked that part as the only section of the film where the story and the emotion worked, but other than that, the film is so boring and uninspired. The pacing is horrible and it isn’t all that well shot. Spielberg’s direction is so bad as was obviously a rush job to make it eligible for the 2018 Academy Awards. He just let the actors do their job and the material work for itself, and he did not lift it in any way at all. It’s basically the poor man’s version of ‘Spotlight’.
The Post is one of the dullest films of the year. Yes, the acting is good and the third act is moving, but the rest of the film is immensely tedious, uninspired and just your regular Oscar bait which is so weakly made as Spielberg’s direction is such a rush job and the dialogue lacks nuance. It’s pathetic how the Academy continues to be Spielberg’s puppet.
