BSA 204 W4 : Saw (2004) Review

I don't know why it took me such a long time to see Saw, it's a movie that I missed out on when it first came out, because you know, I was 7 years old, but it had such a big impact that I can remember it clearly. It had a similar aura about it to something like The Human Centipede when it came out, but unlike that movie I would actually have loved to see it.




The greatest failure of Saw in my opinion is that, for a film so flashy and over the top, it doesn't milk the foot cutting scene at all. I would have loved to see it wrung for all it's worth, originally I actually anticipated a race between the two characters to see who could cut their foot off the fastest, which would have been a ton of fun. It's just such a big part of the film that feels so underutilized, I mean the whole movie builds up to it and the pay-off is just a bit limp.

Overall I think Saw's a really great movie, and somehow I actually feel it's severely underrated.

Screenwriting Lessons I Learnt:

Changing Genres (or sub-genres) is fun and keeps the audience engaged, crime to torture porn to supernatural thriller, these are all present in some form or another in Saw and results in an extremely entertaining film.

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James Wan and especially Leigh Whannell are really cool guys and I've loved watching interviews with them. They've done some really great things in the industry since, launching two more successful franchises (Insidious and The Conjuring Universe), their absence from the Saw sequels is a large factor in why I have no interest in ever actually watching them but I'm glad they moved on to bigger and better things, (although I do think Saw is still their best film).