This film feels like a student's experiment. After following a dozen students around every nook and cranny of a school...we are ready to scream "we get it already!" Anticipating the horror to come, I was hoping this device would make it more palpable and real. But, alas, it failed and did the opposite. Despite being non-actors the students are clichés, to the point I was wondering if it was supposed to be a joke: The jock and cheerleader, the three anorexic valley girls, the nerd, the hirsute schizoid frump...they're all there. We only get a hint of why the two assassins decide to blow up their classmates...until one guy decides to let the principal have it ("you should have listened to us when we said we were being bullied!") before really letting him have it. Totally ridiculous. And the kiss in the shower...was that for Van Sant's titillation, or was that to allude to the boys being taunted as sissies (as at Columbine)? Incredulous.
When the massacre finally comes we are so anaesthetized that the scenes of blood and exploding body parts has no more effect than the previous scenes of picking up food in the cafeteria. The dispassionate, objective view didn't work to increase the horror as it has in other more successful movies; here it seems like a "mocumentary". And please...you hide in a freezer instead of running down the stairs and out the door just beside you?
So, in case you didn't get my opinion...this film stinks to high heaven.
When the massacre finally comes we are so anaesthetized that the scenes of blood and exploding body parts has no more effect than the previous scenes of picking up food in the cafeteria. The dispassionate, objective view didn't work to increase the horror as it has in other more successful movies; here it seems like a "mocumentary". And please...you hide in a freezer instead of running down the stairs and out the door just beside you?
So, in case you didn't get my opinion...this film stinks to high heaven.