This movie jams a thirty minute story into ninety minutes. It starts off with an extended walk-and-talk dialogue between our main characters in their small New Mexico town. The conversation is hard to follow. Characters mumble and talk rapidly at a literally breathless pace. Seriously. The instant one character stops speaking -- even a beat or two before -- another character fires back at that same rapid pace. I was exhausted after the first fifteen minutes straining to sort out the conversation. / The soundtrack has some weird instrumental music choices which don't in any way evoke the atmosphere of a 50s sci-fi / Twilight Zone vibe that the movie makers were apparently striving for. It's like Creative Commons music that they picked up off the Internet for free somewhere. / The framing device -- setting up the movie as a sort of extended Twilight Zone episode -- leads to some bizarre directing choices. Sometimes the movie plays full screen, other times it shrinks it down to a black-and-white screen for no reason that matters. At one point the screen goes blank for an extended period, but the mundane dialogue continues. What was that about? I actually thought something had gone wrong with my TV. / The story is just a re-tread of Close Encounters, but without the big budget effects and mashed potatoes. There's a bit of X-Files-ish weirdness in the middle of the movie, but you can see where it's all leading long before you get there. / Honestly Youtube channels such as Dust are filled with better stuff than this movie and they manage to do it in a half-hour or less. I would recommend the similarly themed 2019 movie Cosmos instead. It's also a low budget movie -- not great -- but more interesting than The Vast of Night.
Review of The Vast of Night
