Purely Joyful Movie!

Boring

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

Buñuel's 1962 masterpiece of bourgeoisie-baiting Freudian repression, 'The Exterminating Angel' is a Surrealist slaughterhouse.A group of wealthy upper-class members of the bourgeoisie find themselves mysteriously trapped inside a house when attending a lavish dinner party. The doors are not locked and there is no logical reason why they cannot leave, yet they remain trapped like prisoners, and likewise, no one can enter (the flummoxed police are stationed outside, trying to work out how to save the rich people). Over the course of the film, the loathing and contempt that they really always felt for both themselves and one another comes bubbling to the rotten surface as they are slowly stripped of their status and pretensions, fighting over water, sleeping on the floor, and insulting one another as their hungry bodies begin to stink from the oppressive heat.In this new world, the bourgeoisie's money and power are reduced to worthlessness. 'Anything but physical violence! This is not like us! Remember who you are, remember your upbringing!', a doctor exclaims, trying to break up a brawl, but this is a meaningless gesture -- here the rich are no better than anyone else, for even the servants and cooks had the earthy precognition to realise what was coming and depart at the start of the film, before the invisible padlocks manifested.This film is a brilliant, incredibly funny example of Buñuel's career manifesto: the rich and powerful are nothing without their wealth, and in the absence of the poor they have no one to control or feel superior to. Take it all away and they become the human beings (ie. animals) that all people really are, deep down. The poor are more important to the rich than they ever realise.A film like 'The Exterminating Angel' serves to remind us that, regardless of wealth, we are all trapped inside the frigid, repressive boxes of our own (and society's) creation, and a conscious decision to leave them on our own terms is nearly impossible.

Although this film is considered a classic, it's filled with political symbolism that is no longer relevant. When you subtract that, you end up with a 95 minute episode of the Twilight Zone. I was unable to have any compassion for the mysteriously trapped characters. I realize that their inability to understand why they are trapped is not supposed to be explained but it takes more adequate character development to make this an interesting situation to me. We only have moments of yelling, anger, frustration, non-sequiturs and unconvincing dialog. Supposedly there are moments of jealousy and betrayal but all this adds up to nothing. The ending is ridiculous without being funny and the ending after the ending was a predictable way to stretch the thin idea past 90 minutes.Yes, Luis Buñuel had an interesting career but I don't know why people consider this his best work.

Perhaps I was born too late to appreciate this film; perhaps I was born on the wrong side of the Atlantic. In 1962 (three years before I was born), this may well have been scintillating, cutting-edge film making. By 2012 standards, "The Exterminating Angel" holds up only as a period piece. It represents its era well much the same way George Melies' "A Trip to the Moon" represents its era. I selected the Melies film for comparison because it is widely regarded as a watershed achievement for 1902. I can think of no other reason why "The Exterminating Angel" should be heaped with such praise by modern audiences - because it shaped what followed it. That alone does not make it a great film.Other better and more enjoyable watershed films include "Lost Horizon," "Metropolis," "Citizen Kane," "2001," "Nosferatu," and "Casablanca." "The Exterminating Angel" is an unfinished thought, too conventional to be considered much of an experiment; it wants to be a thought-provoking message movie, but it doesn't have anything to say and the only thought it provoked for me was "how much longer until I begin to care about what's happening?" Is "The Exterminating Angel" a bad movie? No, but nor does it represent the best that cinema has to offer and deserve to populate so many the top 50 or top 100 lists.My review may very well be derided for being too narrow-minded, ethnocentric, and corrupted by CGI. Trying to learn about the history of film, I looked forward to "The Exterminating Angel" and was more than willing to view it in its own terms. Days after watching this film, however, I still can't shake my conclusion that, even this agonizingly overlong movie was trimmed by three-quarters, the storyline and resulting tele-play wouldn't even make a memorable Twilight Zone episode. Hoping to see a bit of film history, I could find little reason to care about the characters or their plight, its causes and resolution. The film seemed less like a movie than an exercise. In what I have no idea.

Bunuel's 1962 film revolves (almost literally) around a group of middle-class people at a dinner party. This theme would be explored further in The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie but works better in his earlier piece. The premise of the film is playfully simple. The guests of Nobille are trapped in a room at the end of the evening unwilling or unable to leave. That's it. Until the third reel of the film when the epilogue gives us another context in which to view the previous 80 minutes worth of action.The characters are placed within this Kafkaesque narrative, seemingly of their own accord at first. There is no barrier to the next room yet no one can pass its borders. There is no science-fiction at play here, more an existential angst keeping them from what lies beyond. Some of the players half-heartedly try and make their escape but some give-up without trying or stall at the last, crying, unable to move further. Their predicament is not one of comfort either, there is death, starvation and thirst within the group and their ordeal goes on for weeks. Occasionally Bunuel brings the audience out of the room and we see people on the outside staring at the house with as much perplexity as those trapped inside. A rescue attempt is made but again, no one really tries to just walk in, open the doors and let the poor wretches out.What are we to make of the situation. Obviously there is a metaphor that Bunuel wants us to read. Is it a simple case of the middle classes being trapped within their own understanding of the world, with the desire to understand other kinds of people merely an act of lip-service to their supposed ideals? Is it a comment on the Spanish Civil War whereby those on the streets were forced to fight as the middle classes ate their lamb? The ending reveals more than I will say but I think this is Bunuel's best film of those I've seen and it is a crisp, timeless watch which asks more questions than it answers.