DailyView: Day 272, Movie 382

Carl!!!!

So I watched Only on Netflix because of the thumbnail on the streaming service of Chandler Riggs, who played Carl on The Walking Dead. Of course, he ONLY had about five minutes in this movie. Hardly worth even putting on a resume.

So, that was working against the movie… if ONLY that was the ONLY problem I had with ONLY, I would get by. Unfortunately, ONLY has plenty of issues as a film.

ONLY is a film that deals with a comet that brought a virus to earth that began killing all the women on the planet. Virus movies are a little shaky at this point in humanity because of what we all have gone through the last two years. I could get by with the idea of a killer virus, if it had been done well.

Another major problem was the story structure as it was told in a non-linear fashion that simply did not work. The flashbacks were confusing and did not provide specifics to the tale. These scenes simply muddied the water of the tale and made it less cohesive of a story.

Leslie Odom Jr. starred as Will who was trying to protect his girlfriend Eva, played by Frieda Pinto, from the virus. One moment we see the pair trying to quarantine themselves in an apartment and the next they are traveling the countryside and she is sick.

Frieda Pinto was trying to make herself look like a male, but she is a strikingly lovely woman and tucking her long hair under a stocking cap and rubbing some ash on her face to make it look like stubble simply did not make her look like a man. That whole situation destroyed any suspension of disbelief I had in ONLY.

We also saw some scenes in the flashbacks that made me just dislike Eva, and I found her terribly stupid and completely selfish. These flashbacks did not help me feel for her, even a little bit. It did not help that I found the scenes horribly overacted by Pinto. She was much better in other parts of the film, but there were some scenes that were practically unwatchable.

Odom Jr. carried the film. He was very solid in what he had to do. There were dumb things tossed at them to cause conflict (as if his girlfriend, sick with a killer virus wasn’t enough of a conflict). The entire bit with Chandler Riggs could have been left on the cutting room floor. Maybe it should have been left there. It presented nothing to the overall story.

In fact, neither did the story of all the women of the world dying or being taken to harvest their eggs in an attempt to be able to repopulate the species. This was, at best, background noise.

I had some hope that this might be a hidden gem on the Netflix queue, but, unfortunately, this died quickly.