#if ur gonna reply/rb w comments u better be nice

[pathetickuroo]

i'm a film student. here's how i felt about the edge of sleep.

for a bit of background on my "credentials" so to speak: i'm in my second to last semester of studying digital media/journalism at my university. in my program you are required to take a "digital media core" that teaches you the technical aspect of film as well as analysis and a number of writing and screen/scriptwriting classes that respectfully i performed extremely well in. i don't throw "film student" around lightly even though my emphasis is in journalism.

and here's an obligatory disclaimer that this is about the show, not mark. anyway.

overall i found the show enjoyable. it was a very fun watch featuring (and produced by) a youtuber that i've been a fan of for almost a decade. i have to say this, though, and it's going to sound harsh before i get a chance to explain what i mean by it: there is a distinction between enjoyable and "good". i liked the five nights at freddy's movie. that doesn't mean it was good.

i'm not going to come on here and say edge of sleep was bad, because it wasn't! i do think it was good. however (and clearly mark's influence on these things is more than likely slim to nil so don't come into my replies yelling at me for criticizing the show), there were a lot of things that just were kind of okay to me.

firstly, the whale. i believe this was in episode one. frankly? terrible first impression. i found the pitched down voice entirely out of place. it would have been better i think (especially considering the whale only talks that one time and never again) for it to be whalesong with subtitles, the same way they provided subtitles with safet. to be quite honest i think if not for markiplier i maybe would have turned the show off or found it an irredeemable thing based on what had been shown so far, but because i am also a film student, it was likely exacerbated by the fact that i have the mind and knowledge for film. things like this affect "normal people" or "laymen" less, and even aside from what i'm studying i also know my standards in general are. um. high. lmao. in fairness yes for this point i am nitpicking, but a first episode is the "hook" of a show so for it to have had something in it that took me out of it so much was disheartening.

some of the writing felt a bit janky and to be fair i suspect that comes from it being adapted from long-form storytelling into a six-episode, twenty-minute-segment form. i'd like to point out specifically a lot of the problems that i have with the writing/character approach apply mostly to matteo's character. with him i felt there was a lot of, "what the fuck i can't believe this. well whatever i actually don't care anymore so let's do that." he continually, more than anyone else, went back and forth on what his hard limits were in that situation. there wasn't any scene where they were trying to convince him of something (or convince him to do something!) where i felt he actually put up any kind of resistance. it all felt too easy. he should have been more in the middle of the spectrum, for or against, or completely on one side or the other and taken a longer time to convince, rather than swinging from one end of the extreme to neutral in the span of 30 seconds. i like matteo as a character. i think his plot-related decisions were poorly written.

it was also difficult for me to find really any of the characters likeable or particularly interesting or feel sympathetic to them and their struggles. it felt almost as if the writers ran with the assumption that it would be natural to care about the characters because they're characters in the show and you "have to". as a viewer i was never able to really "build a relationship" with the characters. i didn't find linda particularly interesting. frankly i really didn't think dave was a very compelling protagonist either (but this could also be a criticism of the "chosen one" archetype). i didn't care much for ruth. i think the characters i liked the most were katie and dr. castaneda.

something with a technical aspect of the show and its sense of pacing: i thought the "x hours without sleep" endcards were. i mean. they did the job. they certainly did the job. i found them a bit lazy. is it possible for me to say both that "it was clever" and "it was lazy"? that's how i feel. after the initial sequence of dave and matteo driving to the party, it was never dark out again that i can recall. the characters weren't sleeping because they couldn't sleep. why did they never do anything at night? why did the directors (or the editor or whoever) choose the "cop-out" option over ever shooting at night? was it budgetary? was it a time constraint? regardless of the "why", it was noticeable. it felt like one endless day instead of several days on end. there was also (sorry to costuming and makeup) to me almost no visual change in the characters, or there was only sometimes a change. there was one scene where dave had deep circles under his eyes and i was like, "yeah, that's a guy who hasn't slept in a long time." other times later in the plot it was almost unnoticeable. the physical variables that could convey a passage of time (darkness, personal appearance) were missing, i thought.

perhaps they're leaving it open for a season 2, but the ending felt very "whatever" to me. like, okay, we're doing this now. sure. there's a war. okay. aristera. sure. whatever.

additionally: how did they know aristera was 1) real and 2) how to get there? there was no scene or glimpse of them looking on a map or googling (which they have to have been able to do because phones were working, unless the battery had ran out which was also not established in the text) it or anything, so how did they know? how did matteo know where to fly them? it just felt like there were a lot of things that only made sense because they had to magically make sense and not because there was an actual explanation.

to be honest i thought the acting was fine. i don't have anything glaring to comment on with the acting and also, that isn't my area of expertise anyway. i heard some people were saying the acting was too "meh", but i was talking to a friend about it and she pointed out, like, "they're supposed to be sleep deprived. the acting isn't gonna look like normal acting." there's that for your consideration as well.

so do i think it was good? sure. i'd be more likely to say i thought it was fine. do i think for a non-fan it would be a must-see? probably not. do i think it was TECHNICALLY groundbreaking, in terms of direction writing et cetera? no. it had a lot to accomplish based on the source material in not a lot of time and not a lot of budget and you can tell. they did do a good job with what they were provided in terms of resources, but it could have been better.

i was also watching charlie(as in penguinz0 moist charlie)'s review of the show (got 2.5m in before i decided to write my own first) and he brought up a point i think cannot be understated: people who aren't already fans of mark will be less forgiving of these things. i think what happened with me was that i turned off the "markiplier goggles" and saw the show objectively instead of "markiplier did this".

there were also obviously constraints like i said before that would be out of mark's control (direction at large, budget, etc.) so i feel like it's also incredibly unfair and a misrepresentation of the project as a whole to just call it markiplier's thing. i think this whole whatever that's going on with amazon and this and iron lung is unfair, because mark did not write the edge of sleep. he DID write iron lung. for that to be hanging in the balance is absurd. any writing criticism like my own that gets directed towards the edge of sleep may also be unfairly applied to iron lung before it even has legs to stand on. so just in case it wasn't crystal clear: i know iron lung will be good. i want iron lung. that doesn't mean the edge of sleep couldn't have been better.