Al Awda Movie Review: A Disappointment from a Singaporean Filmmaker
A disappointment from a Singaporean filmmaker.
Yesterday I just watched Jason Soo's new movie 'Al Awda'. Jason Soo, for those unaware, is a Singaporean filmmaker who back in 2015, made the great movie '1987 Untracing the Conspiracy' (Search that on Youtube to find it) about how in the 1980s when opposition activists in Singapore were gaining influence, Lee Kuan Yew manufactured a lie that they were 'communists' trying to violently overthrow the Government. With that excuse, the PAP arrested 20+ opposition activists without trial for years, and beat up and tortured them. It's a genuinely powerful movie, I recommend everyone watch it.
10 years later, Jason releases his second movie 'Al Awda'.
Dreadful, absolutely dreadful movie.
Hear this scenario: A Singaporean with hardly any planning, out of a mysterious moral obligation, enters a boat of activists about to protest Israel's blockade and genocide of Palestinians. They spend a week on a boat, reach their destination, and immediately get arrested by Israel's police and deported back.
Why are they doing this? What motivates them? Do they know the consequences? Why is someone willing to sacrifice their lives for a political cause?
The movie is a half-erect penis, it doesn't adequately satisfy any of those questions. You get a bunch of uncharismatic activists doing stuff on the boat, rambling about strategy. Even the parts where the activists try to explain their mindset, it doesn't go deep enough. The movie offers no answers, and more puzzlement.
The footage that Jason Soo had, just wasn't compelling enough for a movie. The movie shouldn't have been made. It's not enough to simply film an interesting event, you have to extract the interesting parts of the event, otherwise you make the interesting boring. And even Jason himself admitted he was not able to extract as much vulnerable and open moments from the interviewees as he'd liked. The movie bored me to tears. In the cinema I was slapping myself to keep myself from falling asleep.
The fact that the boat ride was 8 years ago, and Jason spent 6 years editing the movie is insane. There was no complex editing, there were shots that lingered for 7 minutes straight. Any efficient editor could have finished this movie in 2 weeks.
Jason's shortcomings as a filmmaker is showing. It seems like he was able to get away with it with his first movie, because the footage of Singaporeans talking about being tortured was so compelling, it was hard to fuck it up. But for this movie, when interesting moments aren't simply handed to you, but requires extraction, Jason fails.
It seems like Jason still doesn't have a great historian's sense of the 'intriguing detail'. And to rectify this he needs to finish projects quicker, or work on shorter films, or both. You gain skills and knowledge from audience reaction and feedback. It's hard to get better if your feedback loop is every 6 years.
And yet, Jason Soo is still a genuinely sincere, socially-conscious Singaporean that works to make Singapore and the world a better place. He has created 1 good film and 1 stinker, so I look forward to his next film. I see potential, and if he takes the right path, he might have a few masterpieces in him.