Didn't age well...

This is another great example of how movies were overdone in the 1990s, just like The Matrix. Massive hits when they came out, but try watching them again in this decade and you will see how silly and pretentious they look.

One example. They tried to make NYC look gloomy and bleak. How did they go about it? Well, it rains all the time and everyone's offices and quarters look like they haven't been tidied up in 10 years. Oh and the lights are really dim everywhere. That's it. Even Mills and his wife, who have JUST MOVED IN are living in a shady messed up dumpster. Compare that with a true ageless masterpiece, Blade Runner. That's a totally believable dystopic Los Angeles.

Another example, the Somerset character. So they tried to make him deep and enigmatic, more or less like Morpheus in The Matrix. Instead they both come off as pseudo-pedantic annoying smart-asses. Take this scene: cab driver:"where are we going?". Somerset: "very far from here". Turns out they were just going to the city library. In real life you would probably get punched in the face. Another scene: Mills wife:"so, how long have you lived here?". Somerset: "faaar too long". Oh, what a mysterious and profound thinker. Yes, and he knows Chaucer and Dante.

Brad Pitt was a terrible actor back then, his character his unbearable and his acting makes it even more so. Did we really need a borderline white trash main character to partner up with the oh-so-wise Somerset? We are supposed to care about him, and suffer with him. Instead the only really satisfying bit of the movie is thatGwyneth Paltrow's head gets chopped off. It should happen more often in movies by the way, as she is the most overrated actress ever.

Anyway, this movie has scholarly value as a study case for everything that was horribly wrong with movies back in the 1990s. Do you want some serious timeless neo-noir gems? Get Blade Runner, Chinatown, Fargo, No Country for Old Men, Memento or The Professional. Se7en (did they really decide to spell it that way?!) will look like high-school project film-making compared to those behemoths of cinema.