Paul Dano

Great movies transform the bored spectator into an active participant by completely transporting him or her to another world. It could be a fantastical world full of adventure or a bleak reality full of loneliness and despair. Either or, the viewer expects some kind of fulfillment from a film after dedicating two hours of life to sitting in front of a flickering screen. If it’s a comedy, we want to laugh, if it’s a drama, we long for tension and emotion, and even from a documentary based on actuality, we crave insight and the sense that we learned something new. In a way, Gigantic tries to be all of these things, but it fails miserably because it tries too hard to be original, quirky, and to be “real.”