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The Season of the Witch

So, I just watched The Season of the Witch.

I’m still trying to hash out what I think of this movie… but I’m pretty sure that I don’t like it.

The first thing I noticed was that the music was all wrong. The music is a bombastic, heavy, orchestral, with screaming choirs (imagine listening to the Nazgûl theme from LotR for 97 minutes) and very much NOT 1300s sounding. It’s hard to put my finger on why exactly it bothered me so much. Maybe it was because it didn’t match the emotions on screen, and never tried to build a setting. There should have been at least a little madrigal music in there, but there wasn’t. The music was flailing its arms and yelling, “This is epic, dammit!” but the problem was – it wasn’t.  “Epic” is thousands of orcs attacking Minas Tirith. It isn’t four guys and a girl in an abbey.

The dialogue I could forgive for not being archaic. English at that time was pretty unintelligible to us. The catch phrases, I couldn’t forgive. “Tonight, you’re buying!” was repeated way too much, and I was left gritting my teeth every time I heard it. I get it. These are Men Of Action. I can see they are kicking ass. Can’t they do it with less banter? Also, the smell joke was really lame. It’s a supernatural horror movie set in the dark ages. They wouldn’t be making modern observations about the smells that they lived with daily.

 

( Spoilers! )

 

I don’t know why, but I really wanted this movie to be good. I heard that it did poorly and that the critics didn’t like it, but I wanted it to have been good. It feels like it could have been. Maybe with a different score, and a few more months working on the script so it wasn’t so holey and hokey.

To give it an arbitrary value, I’d say that it’s two out of five. Parts of it were entertaining, but the excuses for the entertaining parts were so badly flawed that they drowned them out.

Also, WTF is with the title? Seasons had nothing to do with the story at all!