Zabriskie Point

I was prepared for this to possibly be a disappointment. I've seen comparisons between Zabriskie Point and Easy Rider, and I absolutely loathed Easy Rider. But I was hopeful anyway, because I want to give every movie a shot, even if it compares to a movie I don't like. That hope was misplaced. Zabriskie Point managed to be every bit as boring and as up its own ass with inflated self-importance as Easy Rider is. I'd do a plot summary, but there isn't one. Really, there's nothing here. Director Michelangelo Antonioni seems to have believed capturing vibes and mood was enough to subvert the need for an actual story. I won't even qualify it with cohesive (not that the movie tries to be that either), just an A to B to C story. Things happen in Point, sure, but very little of it matters, and even less is explained. Why does Mark get arrested for going to bail his friend out of jail, and how is it they're released in the very next scene? If Mark was obscured around a corner when a cop was shot, why is there a manhunt for him? Point is full of plot points that have been forcibly connected without being properly explained, and the overwhelming feeling of the movie is that you shouldn't care, you should just go with the flow, man, because it's all about the vibes. Sorry, but if you're going to ask me to devote two hours of my time to your movie, I need more than vibes. I need a through-line. I need you to pretend there's connective tissue between A and B, instead of jumping from one to the next like a frog. But that would require direction from a capable filmmaker. If you told me that Michelangelo Antonioni was a student filmmaker, my only question would be elementary school or junior high. He cannot capture human beings having a normal conversation, or even normal human behavior. He can't even provide his characters with something approaching definition, as if there's a restraining order against such a thing; Mark is a "chill dude" and Daria is a "groovy chick" and that's the extent of it. Antonioni loves inserting shot after shot after shot after shot after shot after shot after shot after shot after shot of landscapes to fill time. The final sequence -- a house exploding in the imagination of Daria -- is shown from, and I am not kidding, ten different angles., and then multiple household objects are shown exploding in slow motion. If just the repetitive shots and repetitive scenes were trimmed down to only what's necessary to propel what little content this movie has in a forward direction, Zabriskie Point would be, at most, sixty minutes. And if his visual composition showed any semblance of competence at all, it might be forgivable -- it still wouldn't make this watchable, but it'd be forgivable -- but even in that department, he seems incapable of pulling off the most basic level of skill, as he is far more interested in artificially prolonging every scene in some way or making it incomprehensible in some way. Zabriskie Point has nothing to offer. Its characters are all the roughest of sketches of their respective templates. The acting is the minimum necessary that can legally qualify as acting. There is little story and no discernible direction the movie is ever pointing in. It arrives, it ambles around aimlessly for two hours, and leaves, And it is not missed when it leaves.