From my point,it is a breathtaking documentary that needs to be seen at least once.
This is a tough movie to review. For a start, it’s an incredibly breathtaking documentary and definitely not a bad one, but it meets somewhere in the middle in terms of a documentary.
Directed by Davis Guggenheim, who brought us masterpieces such as Waiting For Superman and An Inconvenient Truth, tries his hardest do tell the story of Malala, but ends up covering so much in so little time, the movie often comes off as forced rather than a smooth flow.
Malala’s story is one of the most inspiring I’ve ever seen on film, what this girl did for her country, for women’s rights and for the world is incredible, and she has my upmost respect for that. The problem was, this movie really didn’t know what it wanted to be.
The tone changes too often from dark to light and at times it can come off as jarring. It does attempt to paint Malala as a normal girl despite the extraordinary events that happen to her, however these scenes can often come off as tacky and a little forced to try and make her relatable.
I feel this should have focused more on the aftermath of what happened to her rather than leading up to it and showing what her life was like beforehand. This could have been done in a short five minutes and it would have made the film run a lot smoother. Whilst her life and culture is interesting to learn about, it often feels like the audience is being spoonfed information rather than being inspired and allowing us to come to our own conclusions. That’s what a documentary should do, let the audience work out the answers to the questions rather than flat out reveal them.
That does not change the fact that learning about Malala’s beliefs and the way she stood up to her opposition is one of the most breathtaking and emotional true stories I’ve witnessed on the screen, however this documentary did not do it true justice in my opinion.
This would be the perfect documentary for a classroom, unfortunately, it might just not be the best one for the cinema, despite being very uplifting overall.