What a movie! Ben-X

I, as a staunch movie lover, used to categorize movies before I see and try not to see some movies that scored less than 4 out of 5 stars. Brimming with confidence, I trusted my eyes and intuition in choosing movies. Most of the times, I was right; yet, sometimes my intuition hindered me from watching some of the classic exemplary movies. Few of those “unexpected” movies were such films like Forest Gump, which I thought would be some kind of classically boring dumb movie, and Dead Poets Society, which again I thought would be an orthodoxly educational but pedantic movie. Honestly, I have to admit that Ben-X is one of those best unexpected movies that I have seen recently – unique in a way how movie packed itself like a B-movie, in a way how camera captured the feeling of characters, and of course in a way movie ended.

Movie starts with a game background, assumably Arclord. First I thought this movie would delineate the reality through game characters due to economical reasons, like B-films. About first 5 minutes, the movie deliberately and successfully deceived me through showing only game backgrounds and characters. I never thought I would be impressed by the film skills of Ben-X which I thought would be a B-film at that time; nevertheless, as the story progressed, camera views - shacking camera views and panorama like views - astonishingly well conveyed the inner anxiety of the main character, Ben. Whenever the camera turned to depict other characters, the views were stable and normal as if they were representing the mental state of each characters in the movie. These camera skills not only enabled me to "see" the feelings of the movie characters, but also allowed me to sympathize with the characters. Because the feelings that main character felt was so compellingly conveyed to me, I was almost able to "be" the character in the movie. Ben-X was brilliant.

Though I was impressed by the movie’s film techniques, I was unable to erase the feeling that this movie’s ending would be obvious. Second wrong intuition I made. I thought the ending would rather be Ben committing suicide or die because of a bad illusion. As I have predicted, he commits suicide - at least ostensibly; Him committing suicide was logically coherent in a context of the movie: Ben was floundering in his own dreaming and people around him was panicking. There was no intrinsically strange with Ben committing suicide; however, that deliberate “acting” deluded everyone including me and all of the movie characters. We thought Ben was dead but it was just a part of his act. I was enamored.

If somebody asks me for a movie, I would love to recommend him Ben-X. It tackles with a social problem in a lovely way that it keeps its quality as a good movie and its contents. Not only I found a good movie but also I learned that there are some brilliant movies other than Hollywood movies, Chinese movies, Indian movies and Korean movies.