Bombshell | Film Review

Hey Guys x

It's officially Awards season, and this is a film that got nominated for more Academy Awards than I thought it would - which is great because it's an important story. It came out in the UK yesterday, so there's a lot of time to see it before the Oscars!

In the world of Fox News, many things are swept under the carpet. But when employee Gretchen Carlson (Nicole Kidman) decides to finally speak out about the sexual harassment she had faced at the hands of founder Roger Ailes (John Lithgow), the repercussions affect every woman working under Ailes, including Fox News correspondent Megyn Kelly (Charlize Theron).

I liked this movie a lot, and I was surprised at how little of the story I'd actually heard before watching it.

The film focuses on three extremely important characters that spark conversations that needed to be had at the time that these incidents took place (because, if you couldn't tell, this is a true story), but they are also conversations that we should still be having now.

It gives an insight into a world that most people don't know unless they have a particular interest in it. If you have no interest in journalism, or in watching films about journalism or politics, you're never going to know the ins and outs of working at a news station, which is why a lot of the events that happen in the film are so shocking. But even if you do know the ins and outs, to me it seems like this story is incredibly interesting no matter how much you already know about it.

What I liked about the film is that it shows three women at three separate but connected stages of this situation. It plays out almost like three separate stories that are interconnected, and the fact that it was done like this (including the creation of Margot Robbie's character Kayla) was really smart because it was almost like watching the same woman live 30 years working at Fox News in a short space of time. You can really see the effect that Ailes had on each of these women, as well as the many women working behind the scenes at Fox.

Speaking of Margot Robbie, she is the actress from this film that is getting the most attention (she's been nominated for Best Supporting Actress at the BAFTAs and the Oscars, as well as Charlize Theron who has been nominated for Best Actress). While there was one particular scene in the film that made me completely understand why she was nominated, I was and am really surprised that no one is talking about either Nicole Kidman's performance or her character. Nicole Kidman's character, Gretchen Carlson, is the catalyst for the entire story, and Nicole did an amazing job playing her. More people should be talking about her!

The only gripes I had about the film were that it gets a bit repetitive and lags when we are waiting for women to come forward, due to the fact that we as the audience already know that they do, so it seems pointless waiting so long for it to happen.

In addition to this, it felt like it lasted a lot longer than it needed to in order to get the same point across.

And then there's the fact that these women, who we are made to feel sorry for, have done other things that made me feel a bit uncomfortable about supporting them. Just because they went through this ordeal doesn't mean that they are necessarily good people, but the film doesn't really try to portray that, they are only shown in the victim light. For me it would have been nice to see these characters as morally grey, while still knowing 100% that what Ailes did was disgusting.

The film ends on a much less hopeful note than you'd expect. But for me, that just makes it so much more realistic. The issues that these three women dealt with are issues that we're still dealing with - after all, the events of the film only happened a few years ago. The film also doesn't really explain what became of the three women after the credits rolled, and I liked that it was left somewhat ambiguous.

Overall,the film is out now, so go see it!

7/10

Lou