Emma Reece: Wings of Desire: an existential crisis.

I decided to see this film on a Saturday so campus was completely deserted. I walked into the SWKT and was immediately lost. I have only been in this building once and it was for a focus group on 10th floor. After wondering around the second floor for 10 minutes I eventually found someone to guide me to the theater.

I went to the 3:45 showing so to say that was not packed was an understatement. There were 10 people there total.  A person then went up to the front, said the title of the film, told us it would be 2 hours, and that it would be in German with english subtitles  The lights dimmed, all 10 of us silenced our phones and the very low quality trailers began.

The film began much like a James Bond movie in the sense that for the first 30 minutes I literally had no idea what was going on. We seemed to wander around from the perspective of a guy and just listened to people's existential thoughts about life, death, and loneliness.  Finally after 18 minutes we realize he is some kind of angel but we don't really know what his purpose is.

The key differences between this and American film would be the plot. Usually in American films we find out some kind of mission, problem, or romance within the first couple of minutes but this film seemed to drag on with no apparent plot. Also most notably, American film is usually all in english. the subtitles made it hard to concentrate on what was being shown and more on what was being said.

This movie was 2 hours long and by the 1:30 mark I was done emotionally. In my opinion they did not develop a plot by that point and I was not interested in seeing the ending. I don't want this to ruin my foreign film experience but it definitely was not a good start.