Would you share why you didn’t like Bodies Bodies Bodies?
The film just felt like a lot of nothing to me. Spoilers for it for anyone who is interested in it.
Like people talk about it as if it's this updated version of And Then There Were None that satirises the USAmerican upperclass but it has none of the bite that Christie's work had. Though there are issues with And Then There Were None (spoilers for it I guess), Agatha Christie pretty ruthlessly satirised the British upperclass of the time and part of why it worked so well is that every character is already a murderer of sorts before they come to the island. They are all already bad people whose selfishness lead directly to people dying.
The character in Bodies Bodies Bodies are... not that. Their biggest crimes are being wealthy, being annoying and being Gen Z. The fact that they all turn on each other is meant to represent the way people immediately turn on one another on the internet via cancellation and mob justice and all that, but like, 1) that's a wider internet trend than the people represented by the films' characters and 2) the film is not clever enough for that to work. Because all the characters are knobheads so of course they'd turn on each other, and also, this is a common trope seen in films made before the advent of the internet.
Obviously the film isn't a 1:1 to And Then There Were None but it clearly takes inspiration from it and also it's very easy to compare the two and Bodies Bodies Bodies comes out lacking. I would probably enjoy the film more if it didn't ape And Then There Were None so much because wow this film really defangs Christie's best work.
Bodies Bodies Bodies doesn't effectively satirise anything. It mostly just makes fun of Gen Z because haha they care so much about internet and phone, and idk I think that's a tired trope and a complete misunderstanding of Gen Z.
It also falls into some of the traps that it's meant to be satirising. Like there's the whole thing between Sophie and Bee where they're not really honest with each other and don't know each other that well, and part of that is indicated by Bee being confused and worried when Sophie says she loves her because they've been dating for 6 weeks and all that, but to quote Eileen Jones:
"But love isn't necessarily defined by knowing each other well. That's more of this nonsense people believe now, that the only real love is healthy, wholesome, and balanced, like a high-fiber diet, when real love can be volatile, dangerous, annihilating. There's no reason, initially at least, to think Sophie can't be honestly in love with Bee."
Like I'm supposed to think Sophie is lying to Bee about loving her when like, yeah, you can feasibly be with someone with six weeks and love them. That's not a sign of dishonesty. And like their rocky relationship is fairly important to the plot itself so like, I need to genuinely believe in this dishonesty, which I didn't initially.
The film isn't all bad, like the cinematography is great and the sound design is very effective, considering how repetitive this story can get, the pacing was pretty good. The acting is all very good, especially Amandla Steinberg and Maria Valcheva Bakalova. If Valcheva Bakalova wasn't in this film, I'd probably have turned it off halfway through.
I did also really enjoy the reveal that Greg is a vet as in, a veterinarian and not a military vet. That was pretty funny. I'll give the movie that.
If it had been that clever throughout, I would have enjoyed it a lot more. But it's not. It's trying to do something and is falling flat on its face most of the time.
Especially the ending. Where 1) the ending really shows how much And Then There Were None inspired the film and 2) how much better And Then There Were None is. One ends with the characters killing themselves because there's no way to save themselves after all that's happened, and the other ends with a character gripping a smartphone and yelling "I've got coverage!"
If I didn't dislike the film by then, that final line really made it.
If you similarly didn't like the film the way that I didn't, I'd recommend Eileen Jones' review. It's a very fun read and very cathartic.
annaxmalina
dededos
izzy806
gummygunk
jbbartram-illu
dailybridgerton
origamiaround
areudirty
