Iron Lung

0.1 - My first draft of this review got deleted while I was typing & now I’m even more mad.

This is unequivocally the worst theater movie I’ve ever seen, & one of my least favorite movie experiences of all time. And that’s saying a lot coming just 24 hours after I saw Mercy. The quick hits are: horrible pacing, bland and restrictive settings, mid at best acting, terrible sound, bad lighting & an overabundance of unnecessarily tight shots in an already crowded space, & absolutely no horror in a horror movie.

It’s only slightly more confusing than it is pure, unadulterated boredom. There’s like a handful of moments of good production I guess, but the story issues are so horrendous that the production does nothing for me.

I’ll preface by saying that I don’t know much of anything about Markiplier other than he plays video games on YouTube & had something to do with Five Nights at Freddy’s blowing up. I’d also never heard of the game Iron Lung. I just thought the poster was kinda cool & saw a little excited chatter online.

So my biggest issue is how utterly confusing & non-sensical this was. I understand the game is a small indie game without a ton of exposition, but a movie needs to fill in those gaps.

What exactly was the quiet rapture? Was this guy part of a terrorist organization? Did they cause the QR? What did they have to do with trees? Who were the other people in the flashback memory moments? Why did any of that require them to sail a submarine around an ocean of blood on an alien moon? What were they actually looking for & why? Then just when I thought I had a little bit of a grasp of what was going on, it broke from the main story to get existential & surreal & unclear on whether he was dead or lost or having a psychotic break. Did he survive? Did he actually find anything? Was he able to connect with his crew above at all? And none of this was helped by the fact that half the movies dialogue came through distorted by a broken radio. Maybe some of these answers were there & I just couldn’t understand them, but that’s a problem in itself.

Overall, I usually don’t mind abstract or esoteric but I feel like as a casual viewer, I shouldn’t leave a movie not being able to explain anything at all about the core story. Really all I had was a criminal was trapped in a submarine where he had to take pictures. And I’m sorry, but that’s just boring in movie format. Especially when it’s mostly one actor, who doesn’t have much acting experience, & not much of a story to back him up.

I just have nothing positive here, because a criminal forced to sail an alien moon’s ocean of blood and face sea monsters (?) shouldn’t be boring or confusing, & this was so much of both. And that’s super disappointing because the basic premise of the game from Wikipedia seems interesting enough. Clearly being a good YouTube creator is unfortunately not a directly transferable skill to making a feature length film.

Never, ever, *ever* again.

Simon better than me I would have ended it all the MINUTE the submarine submerged

Markiplier should really be commended for how much he’s able to do with limited resources and material to work with, however, the movie is incredibly dialogue based, and I didn’t think that it was engaging enough to keep me hooked for how long the film was

9/10

So happy for Mark. I really did enjoy the atmosphere and it was super special to see in theaters

My will to live is not THAT strong. I enjoyed it especially knowing nothing about the game, but I’m now going to either play or watch it. It was a little slow at the beginning and I had an issue with some sound mixing but overall it freaked me out and markiplier did well.