saw vii

My basic feeling when I reviewed saw 6 was that it had kinda disappeared up its own fundament.

The saw films have always tried to have an approach where there's a twist to them, so when you get to the point of having 6 or 7 films, you've piled on so many twists that you probably don't know whether you're coming or going.  It also probably doesn't help that (as the commentaries indicate) none of it was really planned - they've just kinda gone with the flow.

I'm setting aside the fact that the twist in the first film isn't really a twist as such and was kinda irrelevant.  What's more important is that in the early films you could genuinely see that there was a reasonable chance most of the people would have a chance of doing what was required of them and surviving.

Yes, it would be brutal and nasty and the thing they'd have to do was traumatising and painful, but you felt there was a good chance of them making it.  In the later films - 7 especially - that seems to have gone away.

Indeed, in most traps they came to rely on other people having to do something and / or there was a death guaranteed.  In other words, one or more people had to make a decision that affected somebody else and often times that decision resulted in one person dying, rather than another.

This was kinda explained by what happened in the story that flowed through the narrative, but it also started to feel a lot like pandering to the audience.  An audience that was, by now, almost entirely consisting of gore hounds and more hardcore fans.

This of course was not helped by all the complicated back story - you couldn't watch most of the later films unless you'd seen the earlier ones.  There was no way you could 'dip in'.

In 7 you get more of the same.  Indeed, you get so much more of the same this feeling of pandering to the core audience becomes pretty overt.  I mean, they've set it up as the last one (both commentary tracks hint that actually maybe they'd do more in the future - you never could keep a good horror movie killer down) so they kinda had to do that, but still, there's so many deaths and so much gore that it just becomes a bit silly.

Especially at the end - the people who die have nothing to do with traps or what was meant to be the point of the film in the first place.  I mean, at the start, Jigsaw was very clear about how he never killed anybody - he just tested them to see if they could break through and survive.

At the end of 7 you've got exactly the opposite - all the traps are virtually un-winnable or some people are guaranteed to die and a lot of the deaths are just nasty killings, not even traps.

In other words, it kinda has become torture porn - that label the critics slapped on it but probably wasn't deserved at the start is really what the films now definitely are.

One last thing - the screaming in this film is ridiculous.  I mean, people always used to scream a bit, obviously, but mainly when they really had something to scream about.  Or you'd get bits where they tried to hold back the screaming or they couldn't scream.  Now the screaming becomes like an iron bar to beat you into submission with.  It's all just a bit too much, much like the film itself.

If they ever do re-start it, I hope they go for something a little less complicated, or go back to when it was Jigsaw proper and it was about proper (and significant) moral lessons and winnable traps.