Always Watching: A Marble Hornets Story
by James Moran
If I know anything about the internet, the internet loves Slender Man. Slender Man has influenced many villains in film such as The Silence in Doctor Who and Owlman in Lord of Tears. Slender Man, himself, has been featured in many series of unrelated films. Each has given him a different backstory and lore to follow. One such example is the YouTube series Marble Hornets, in this mythology Slender Man is known as the Operator. The series was so popular that the creators sold the film rights which would eventually become Always Watching: A Marble Hornets Story. The film differs greatly from the web series but we'll get into that later.
Milo is a camera man working for a local news station along with Sara, a reporter. They hook up on New Year's Eve and have a small relationship blossoms in the following weeks. Sara soon dissolves the relationship believing it to be a mistake. Milo is dissatisfied with her decision and begins stalking her. Around that time the team gains a new member, Charlie. The team shadows a crew that investigates abandoned home and seizes valuables to prevent looting. There is something wrong with one of these houses, the house is abandoned but everything is intact, power is on, and it's fully furnished. It's almost as if the family just disappeared. The team finds a series of home videos recorded by the missing family. The family became paranoid that someone was stalking them and to make matters worse, a man with no face and suit begins appearing in the background of their movies. Milo starts noticing that the figure is now appearing in his video recordings too. Milo tries to confide in his coworkers but, with the revelation that he's been stalking Sara, they think he's crazy. If he fails to convince Sara and Charlie, they could be the next to vanish.
Marble Hornets is well known for its complicated and detailed plot and storytelling methods. The film however, significantly watered down in comparison. Always Watching: A Marble Hornets Story is a simple tale of an evil force killing for unknown reasons and characters are trying to survive. Supposedly this movie belongs to the same universe, however it doesn't follow the continuity of the web series. For example, in the movie the Operator can only be seen on film. In the series, the Operator can be viewed outside of film but is an interdimensional that behaves on a quantum level of reality, meaning his position in time and space cannot be determined unless being directly observed. Thusly, recording him on film binds him to our dimension and limits his influence. The movie also fails to give the Operator a motive outside of being evil. The series doesn't give explicit motives but just suggestions, a widely believed theory is: The Operator is just trying to erase his existence by first erasing memories, and when that fails he takes to killing those who knows of his existence to free himself from our dimension. I could go on listing the differences between the series and the movies but this review is about the movie.
Always Watching has tons of other problems, besides continuity. One such problem is that the movie doesn't really make the Operator seem like a threat until the end of the movie rolls round and people start dying. He's just chilling in the background and people start flipping their shit when they are given no reason to. Secondly, this movie takes The Ring approach to the ending. You know in The Ring once the truth is uncovered about the dead girl everyone thinks they're safe. Then, they learn they actually aren't unless they make a copy of the movie. Similar thing in Always Watching, the characters think they uncover the truth to break the Operator curse but clearly they don't and everything goes wrong. This creates a plot hole, why was the mother "freed" from the curse of the Operator and the main characters weren't? I'll tell you why, because reasons. Main characters have to die in found footage movies because that's the cliché. To find footage, the footage must first be shrouded in mystery, no one can be left to explain the events. Only the camera can remain.
There were several instances in the movie where I had no idea what was going on. Mainly I was confused when Milo decides to take a projector and project a live video stream across the room. I had no idea what this was trying to accomplish. He was sleeping, it's not like he could have even seen the projection across the room. Maybe it was his way of trying to record two rooms at once? I doubt this is the case though, because it's just as easy, actually easier, to run two cameras at the same time and record the feed to your computer. I also thought maybe this was his way of trying to determine where the Operator was in spatial relation to Milo. I realized this also made no sense because the Operator would have just appeared on camera in the room. Seriously, what was Milo trying to achieve here? Will someone please explain it to me? The creators got a cool looking shot of the Operator touching Milo in his sleep, but that's all it accomplished. It just felt like that whole Kinect thing from Paranormal Activity 4, a gimmick.
Always Watching: A Marble Hornets Story was a movie I was really excited about for at least two years. It was originally titled Marble Hornets: The Operator and was supposed to be released in 2013, evidence of this is in the film. The New Year's Eve party took place at the end of 2012 and the rest of the movie takes place in 2013. Well, 2013 came and went and it was assumed to come out in 2014. In 2014, nothing. At this point, I was thinking if it didn't come out in 2015 it wasn't going to come out ever. I remember even looking into the film as late as February or March and still no announced release date. I casually looked into the movie again a few days ago and it was released with little to no notice. Honestly, I think it would have been better if this movie never came out. The fans were looking forward to better effects compared to what the series offered. Other than a slightly better looking Operator, the fans got the exact same level of visual effects as the series.
Overall, this movie seemed like a money grab hoping to market off the Marble Hornets sensation. However, it seemed like the filmmakers understood little to nothing about what made the series so successful. Clearly the filmmakers watched only a handful of episodes before making this blasphemy. They even made claims that the movie fits into the Marble Hornets universe, which clearly isn't true because it doesn't even follow any of the established lore. Minus a few references to the series that anyone who watched the first three episodes could make, this movie had nothing to do with the series. It even failed even in marketing off the success of the series, because the series ended last year. One year is plenty of time for people to forget about Marble Hornets. It also didn't help that no one even knew when this movie was going to be released, it just came out of nowhere. I don't even think there was any sort of PR regarding this movie. Everyone forgot about it before it was even released. I know it's a bit early to say this, but Always Watching: A Marble Hornets Story is the biggest let down 2015 is going to have to offer.
Billy Wayne Martin, HMS