#and i do adore some of the shots especially the ones in els void

[pinkeoni]

Not to be too neg but s3 visuals aren’t that good either

#i mean its all subjective so if you think it looks good you arent wrong #this is just all my opinion #i think we were in an era of time where it was believed that bright colors = good visuals #and i do adore some of the shots especially the ones in els void #but tell me why mikes basement and hops cabin looked so YELLOW all the time #i love that scene with will in his wizard hat but why is the background so YELLOW #they also switched cameras and it just made everything look so superficial and maybe thats the point but idk #the season that felt the most netflix original. to me #stranger things

[antialiasis]

El Camino

Well, we finally got our actual Jesse closure!

My feelings are... hmmm. There were some extremely good bits. Some favorites:

THE BUG

JESSE FEEDING TODD’S TARANTULA OF COURSE YOU DID YOU ADORABLE THING

Jesse’s PTSD, the shower flashback, the panicked awakening

Jesse’s face and body language giving himself up to the ‘cops’, ohhhhh man

That one moment where he starts putting the money in a bag and Neil points the gun at him and Jesse tells him to do it and actually closes his eyes for a moment and thinks he really might, before he doesn’t and he launches into the manically confident speech about why they won’t

The whole sequence where Todd sends him to get more cigarettes and he finds a gun instead and takes it and Jesse knows if he shoots Todd they’re going to know what happened and kill Brock, and he sort of limply wants to be capable of that but he just isn’t, and the way he flinches away from Todd during that whole bit

Todd is such a horrible oblivious moral void oh my god I feel better about Jesse ending up killing him after everything he witnessed and went through here

just in general any moment of Jesse breathing, sobbing, etc.

Jesseeeeeeeeeeee

Skinny Pete calling him his hero, awww

That season two flashback with Walt was absolutely delightfully early Breaking Bad, Walt still trying to be kind of encouraging and genuinely concerned about getting the money to his family, Jesse naive and ridiculous and their whole interaction there - “Yo, I totally graduated high school, you dick!”

Jesse actually gets to go to Alaska and send a letter to Brock and have a peaceful life doing art or making boxes, and really that’s what we all wanted out of this

I think what I was wanting or expecting here beforehand was something more focused on Jesse’s recovery, while what the movie is mostly about is ultimately Jesse’s efforts to collect enough money to pay the vacuum cleaner guy to disappear him to Alaska. In a way that was sort of disappointing, but also understandable - it definitely gives the movie more of a plot and some real suspense and tension, and there’s a really authentic Breaking Bad sensibility to that.

It does mean it climaxes with a shootout and an explosion, which is extremely Breaking Bad and also really not what I wanted as the climax of a Jesse movie. But I do appreciate, especially after rewatching bits, that the movie really shows Jesse wanted to get through this without hurting anyone. He broke into his parents’ house because he knew there was a safe and he thought there’d be money in it; he only looked up the address of the Kandy company after finding guns there instead. And he really did mean it about not coming there to rob them. At first I was surprised that the flashback showing how Jesse had met Neil before didn’t actually show Neil really taking part in his abuse - the earlier flashback had made it seem so ominous. But Jesse didn’t want revenge; he genuinely hoped maybe, maybe this guy who’d seen a bit of what Jesse had suffered would be just sympathetic enough to just give him this extra $1800, a drop in the ocean. Neil had been semi-sympathetic enough to let him have that third and go.

Of course, Jesse’s not stupid, and he had a backup plan, and Neil was coked up enough to suggest a fucking duel, after closing the door and standing in front of it - it’s not like Jesse could’ve just walked out at that point. And, well. Jesse killed more people. But at least it was bad and traumatizing and there was a shot of him breathing and worked up afterwards.

(I loved how then he threatened those other three guys, telling them if they told the cops he would be coming for them, and like he gives a shit if they have kids - while we know of course Jesse won’t be coming for anyone, and he gives all the shits whether they have kids, but if he just scares them enough now he can walk away and never have to kill anyone ever again.)

I wished the movie had engaged more with the possibility of Jesse actually giving himself up. Making it to Alaska and starting over is good - we know he’s been punished more than enough for every misdeed he’s committed - and of course there are very understandable reasons for him to be desperate to just start over and get to have some kind of actual life, instead of being tried for multiple murders and other crimes and spend the rest of his life reliving the past two nightmarish years in jail. But we didn’t really get to see him actually considering it at all, which is a shame, especially when the idea is brought up at multiple points but we just never quite end up really engaging with it.

Man, though, I really want to rewatch all of Breaking Bad now. The ending’s definitely massively more satisfying now that there is more Jesse and more followup on everything that happened to him in the last couple of episodes, and a real sense that he probably is going to be all right. Ultimately that’s what this movie really needed to do, and it did that well.

#breaking bad #breaking bad meta #el camino #jesse pinkman #ramble #review #my buttons