Skip to main content

Nerve

 


There are a ton of movies that deal with the impact of social media on our lives. Some do it better than others. Some are just completely ham fisted. Nerve, starring Emma Roberts and Dave Franco, unfortunately falls closer to that second category.

Emma Roberts stars as Vee, a timid girl who is afraid to even tell her mother that she wants to go to a college in another state. When her friend tries to help her by talking to her crush, and ends up humiliating her instead, it becomes a turning point for Vee. That is when she decides to sign up for Nerve. Nerve is an online game, sort of, where there are players and watchers. Players take dares from watchers, and get rewards. Vee is dared to go to a diner and kiss a stranger. That is how she meets Dave Franco's Ian.

Ian and Vee end up teaming up, partly through their attraction to each other and partly because the watchers want it. In a matter of a few hours Vee gains enough confidence to do things she would never have done before, and even confronts her best friend Sydney for keeping her in her proverbial shadow all these years. Vees ranking in the game is climbing, but she soon discovers a sinister side.

It turns out that Ian had set her up for a fight with her friend. Her bank account gets emptied, she gets taken hostage by a player and blackmailed into finishing the game. Of course the new and improved Vee isn't going to take this lying down. She and her friends concoct a plan to take down the game without having to take out each other. There is a twist ending that's not much of a twist, but I still won't spoil it for you.

The message of the movie is, like I mentioned earlier, completely unoriginal, but the actual plot isn't so bad. One thing that confused me is that it was made to seem that there was no big bad, that everyone just had their darker impulses encouraged by being on this social media platform. However, when it is shown that Ian was sent to the diner to meet Vee and their whole friendship was planned by the watchers, I couldn't help but think that this showed an unbelievable amount of cunning, forethought, and planning by a random group of jerk-offs on the internet.

The movie also seemed to have a hard time building tension. Even the stand-off at the end didn't seem have me on the edge of my seat. The charisma of the leads helps you to be a little more invested in a movie that would otherwise be a complete bore. Samira Wiley, best known as Poussey in Orange Is the New Black, shows up as the leader of a group of hackers, and even if she isn't terribly convincing in the role I really like her so that was cool. The writing wasn't out of the park, but it wasn't completely awful either, with the exception of Juliette Lewis (playing Vee's mom) who is made to say ":You are the dumbest smart kids I've ever seen". I'm sure the writers thought this was super clever, but it just came off as corny, and really out of place since the kids she says it to haven't really done anything dumb.

At the end of the day, Nerve isn't a movie I would recommend going out of your way to see. But since it's on Netflix you really don't have to, and there are worse ways to kill an hour and a half.

 

 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Movies That Really Changed My Life

I have talked about a couple of early movies that changed my life, like  Star Wars  and  The Rocky Horror Picture Show , but I didn't go into detail about how they did so. Star Wars, of course, changed everyone's lives. It was one of those things that made us rethink how we could tell stories and how movies could be made. It nerdified an entire generation and can be said to have led to the culture we have now, dominated by comic book movies and video games. The Rocky Horror Picture Show opened my mind up to different ways of life and expressing sexuality while also promoting messages of positivity and courage in life. (This may not be what people think of when they see that movie, but it's in there. Don't dream it, be it.)  Another movie that really hit me was Almost Famous, Cameron Crowe's not-quite-biographical movie about a kid working as a reporter for Rolling Stone magazine in the early 70's. The Tiny Dancer scene made me think of times when music had helpe

5 Fun Pop Culture Facts Strike Back

  Miami Vice's Fancy Duds Miami Vice was a new benchmark for style over substance in television drama. Not saying it wasn't fun to watch, but that had more to do with the soundtrack and the way the show looked than the writing. The show runners knew this too. That's why the wardrobe budget for the pilot alone was $70,000.00. That's in 1984 money too. Zeppelin's Fourth Led Zeppelin's fourth album technically doesn't have a title, the band wanted the music to stand on it's own. It has been referred to as IV (due to it's being the 4th album obviously) and Zoso (due to the rune Jimmy Page chose to represent him which looks like those letters). The most whimsical title I've seen for it was in the book Rock Revolution published by Creem magazine, who called it @#%&. Paid Laughter If you are smart enough, you can turn any skill into a career, no matter how silly it may seem. Take Ann Shalla, who would laugh at almost anything, and had a v

How Pop Culture Made Me Kinky

Fetishes seem much more prevalent these days than they were in the past. Of course moralists will say it is because our society is rotting in decadence. Others will say it is because we are more open and free to express ourselves. Maybe both are true to an extent. But I believe that pop culture has played a part in whatever the reasons are. I believe I can personally trace some of my fetishes back to pop culture, specifically t.v. and movies.  I think everyone knows that there was a bondage element built into Wonder Woman by the creator William Moulton Marston. Well, my very first crush was on Lynda Carter, the actress who played Wonder Woman in the 70's t.v. show. I was too young to watch in first run, but I saw reruns, and it was true love. It may have been in part die to her charm and her wholesomeness, but it also had no little part due to her almost spilling out the top of her red white and blue bustier. Batgirl on the Adam West Batman show had a similar if less strong effect