This movie asks the question, What if ET were less creepy? From the font of the opening credits to the opening sizzle scene to the pacing, TLOO is in so many ways a throwback to the coming of age movies of the late 80s and early 90s, capitalizing on the nostalgia of that time by locating the movie in a fictional Eastern European country in order to allow everything to feel dated and rundown while also having access to some contemporary pop culture references. The plot is pretty simple: a group of boys are tasked with hunting the town pest, ochi, when the daughter of the ochi exterminator befriends an ochi thereby giving her purpose and a mission that puts her on a collision course with her father and a fated reunion with her mother.
As far as I can tell, the movie does not suffer from backstory syndrome or trauma amnesia–bad things happened to those around her and most people don’t tell on them too much because the present is complicated enough. But beyond that initial premise, not that much happens. The gremlin had to go to the bathroom for the first time in a year’s worth of movie watching during the movie, which meant leaving for all of ninety seconds of what seemed like a pretty inconsequential scene half way through, but when I asked my parents at the end some simple questions about what had happened in that scene which led to later events which seemed pivotal, they couldn’t answer even those simple questions, and in some ways they didn’t even really acknowledge the premise of the questions, which made me think they maybe weren’t paying really close attention at all, or maybe the movie really was pretty sparse on details, which would be cool.
The gremlin has been cooing like an ochi for a few days since they saw the movie, so it can’t have been a total waste–even though I’m not really sure what the movie had to say beyond being pretty pro cute animatronics.
I thought it was boring, but I did love Willem Defoe’s gas station knight’s armor.
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