My excitement to see the Montauk Chronicles was spurred on by a radio programme on the release of the internet movie earlier this month. In that programme, the organiser was interviewed and a great deal of information was shared. I was so excited to pay for and download the movie to learn more about the Montauk Project. I researched the film and learnt that it had been a decade or more in the making, having been crowdsourced. I would imagine, then, that there were quite a few people interested in hearing some information about the subject of the Montauk Project.
SPOILER ALERT:
While the cinematography, lead ups, suspense, scariness and special effects were amazing in the film, I cannot recommend the film because I actually learnt more information in the radio programme than I did in the film. I was left feeling that perhaps the truth that is "missing" is that select persons have been implanted with false memories of the Montauk Project, or, more likely, that it was a psy op to mislead us from something else that happened on the site. My opinion du jour is that there were several consipirators, some of whom the filmmaker had to ply over a decade, who felt that they could promote their own products, selves or sales of their own materials based upon an elaborate tale. You may think me horribly harsh to say this based upon the allegations of abject cruelty in the film by those who appeared but do, as the filmmaker suggests, look at the expressions and body language of those speaking. Do you see wincing, agitation, hand wringing, nails into palms, sweating or pupils dilating? No? Me neither. SPOILER ALERT: It's another MOCKUMENTARY. I feel foolish and it's not the first time. Filmmakers who think we like to be titillated this way need to study the victims of sociopaths to see that it is neither "entertaining", nor is good fun. To those of us interested in such subjects, it's a right slap in the face.
It is said that it took 10 years and crowdsourcing to produce the film. 10 years and such a slapdash job at evidence, finding others who had similar experiences? One need only see the complaints of crowdsource contributors up until this year to see the anger they have had until recently about the lack of production of the film. (No, I'm not an investor, I was only introduced to this through a C2C radio programme just this month.)
Would it take 10 years to produce this film? No, IMHO. Is it an overproduced, over-SFXed rebuttal to the lack of a product of the crowdsourcing for the past 10 years? My uneducated guess is: yes. See the first half hour and see if you don't chafe at the overproduction and lack of documentary content. I'm not referring to documentation of the Montauk project, only to my perception that it would have been better to hear more unedited reports from the experiencers in the film, so as to make our own conjectures, as the filmmaker asks us, as to whether the subjects of the film are cracked, telling the truth or just making fun of us all for paying for the film, rather than the SFX.
As they say, your milage may vary.
