A movie review, with no swearing

I watched the movie Fall on Netflix on the weekend, and was somewhat impressed.   (I only knew of it because I remembered that Critical Drinker reviewer really liked it - despite it being based around two female leads.)   

I would describe it as generally well made, B Grade melodrama with a massive hook - fear of heights - that keeps you in until the end.   A bit like how I enjoyed that first mega shark movie  as B or C grade material but with fantastic production design and imagery.   (What was it called?  oh yeah - The Meg.)

For those who don't know - two young women, both into "free" climbing (or whatever they call going up sheer cliffs with minimal ropes) - decide (for melodramatic-ish reasons I won't go into here) to do a climb up a needle-thin abandoned TV tower in the middle of the desert, and manage to get stuck on top on the tiniest of platforms. The rest of the movie is about their efforts to be rescued. 

It's one of those movies where you can be pedantic and pick apart many, many details; but I think for most people, the details don't  matter much because of the near constant queasy feeling that comes from so many shots that look convincing (or convincing enough) with respect to height and danger.  (And I say this as a person with an "average" fear of heights:  my personal fear of most note is around claustrophobia in caves.  I actually can't watch films or documentaries which spend any more than a very short time showing cavers crawling through spaces so tiny that they might get stuck.)

Now, it's clear, given the state of movie magic, that the actors would never have needed to be on top of a real 2,000 foot tower to make the movie.   But I was keen to see a "making of" video about it, and there is indeed one on Youtube.

You can skip through the first 10 or 15 minutes of the director and writer talking of their inspiration, etc, until you get to the part where they show how they made it, using a tower that was (I think they said) a hundred feet high, rather than 2,000 feet.   Quite amazing how well it is all spliced together in the movie.

But the other thing that amused me from the "making of" video is that the original script had a lot of swearing in it, and after seeing the rough cut of the movie, the studio told the director they had to change that, because the film would lose too much potential audience with the restrictive rating it would get with the amount of swearing.

(I actually had notice the unusual lack of swearing in the film - it felt like it was a film deliberately aiming for an age range of around 12 to 22.  As it turns out - it definitely was!)   

So, how did they solve the problem of removing so many swear words from a film often shot in relatively tight close ups?   They used "deepfake" style computer graphics to change the speaking mouth shapes to convincingly remove the excessive use of F's and M-F's, and change them to something milder!

That's pretty funny - and just goes to show that they could have saved themselves a lot of effort if they just knew from the start that the studio would not be happy with too much swearing.

Anyway, if you watch the movie, be aware that I know there is a lot you can have issues with - I don't consider it an A grade screenplay by any means.   And there is one technical aspect that I thought was laughably silly - wait til you see the lightbulb at the top of the tower.    But the actors do well enough with the material, and did face a challenging shoot outdoors stuck on a 100 foot tower for most of it.  And it made me feel very queasy, so it's worth watching!