Darjeeling Limited movie review

No real spoilers here, however if you want to be completely surprised by the movie, I'd wait to read this. Sometimes I don't like to hear people's reviews until after I've seen the movie myself...

I saw Darjeeling Limited on Saturday. I adore Wes Anderson movies and this one was no exception; I obviously loved it. I am always amazed at the care he takes in seemingly every single shot. The composition - the objects, placement, angles - is intricately deliberate. He must not only be extremely meticulous, but also have a very specific vision of each piece of visual stimuli that his viewers experience. I can't imagine that he wings anything when filming, however I'm sure it's the case that he's an artistic genius and every now and then he does improvise. The colors were amazingly vibrant and the whole thing was a visual masterpiece as far as I'm concerned.

As for the characters...

I absolutely love that Anderson uses a varying line-up of recurring actors in his movies, specifically because the actors he has chosen are so fantastic. As you can gather from the trailer, the three main characters are brothers. Before seeing the movie I thought it was kind of funny in an odd way that he chose three people who couldn't be any more clearly NOT brothers... Owen Wilson with the blond hair, Adrienne Brody with his tall and slender physique, Jason Schwartzman being short and stouter in comparison, and none have similar facial features. But I quickly got over that and realized that they were perfectly cast for the characters they are portraying. Beyond the main characters you get some fun surprise familiarity with other characters, but I won't spoil it by saying who.

As for the story line...

I don't really hate to say it, but the plot was a little light-weight. I don't hate to say it because I still loved the movie anyway. But truth be told, it lacked the involvement that Anderson's movies usually have (sort of the way Bottle Rocket lacked activity, for lack of a better word). After I left the movie and was thinking about it, there was only a couple of those stirring turns in direction that his movies usually express, and even those were subtle. The one truly pivotal & defining scene in the movie was quite reminiscent of the Kingsley/helicopter scene in Life Aquatic and the Richie/suicide attempt in Royal Tenenbaums, so I guess you could just say that the one action packed scene felt very familiar.

But that one criticism aside, when asked what I think of the movie, I intend to respond, "beautifully fantastic." The dialogue and visuals really made it a pleasure to watch.