I didn't like Saltburn. (For a good reason)

I watched Saltburn because of the extreme amount of attention and traction it got. I expected for the movie to have something extreme and crazy because of the sheer amount of posts i had seen with words along of the lines of "omg that scene in Saltburn was so crazy and weird." 

About 20 minutes in I was already losing interest in the premise, in more laymens terms, I was bored. As the movie continued I was still trying to figure out what made this movie gain so much attention for being an "out there" or "controversial" movie. 

I had also already started to also notice some strikingly similar plot aspects to the book and movie The Talented Mr.Ripley and the book Brideshead Revisited. To show the extent of the similarites I will list the respective plots (simpliefied) of each of these pieces of media and let yourself judge for yourself. 

Saltburn: A poorer student attends a prestigious university where he meets richer student and they become friends. he gets invited to house, a large manor called Saltburn. During the poorer students time there, he becomes envious of the easy life that richer student and his family has. He has a small romance with his friend's sister. He suffers hot and cold relations with his friend and starts to become obbsessed with him. It comes to a head when he eventually kills his friend and his family and takes control of the mansion. 

The Talented Mr.Ripley: A man with a gift for impressions and lying travels to Italy one summer to retrive the rich son of a upper class man. Through a series of lies, he becomes friends with the son while also keeping a lie with a women he meets on his journey to Italy that he is actually the rich son. Over that time in Italy, he comes obbsessed with the son, and suffers from the hot and cold, almost borderline, personality that his friend has towards him. Through a series of events, he ends up killing his friend among others. 

Brideshead Revisited: The book is about an officer who during his time in the service is stationed at a manor that brings around many memories from his life. In the novel he recalled the; during his time at a prestigious university, a poorer student befriends a much richer counterpart. Quickly becoming fast friends, the student is invited to his richer friends mansion, named Brideshead, for the summer. He is perplexed by the vastly different lifestykle that his friend has. He has a small romance with his friends sister. His friend falls into alchoholism and the poorer student is not sure how to deal with it and gives in to supplying his friend with alchohol and money. (The rest of the novels acounts his later activities as an architectural painter and his reunion with is friends sister and their plot to divorce their respective partners and marry each other. 

Throughout all of these there is common themes of the divide between the different social classes, which is nothing new and is cited within many works. However, many of the actual plot devices are very similar and when I looked into it, the directer and writer stated that neither of these works has anything to do with the events of her movie, which I found to be highly unlikely. 

Bringing this back to the point of the supposed "unconventional" nature of the movie, many of the scenes that are cited for this do not actually advance the plot foward, leaving them very stale in my eyes. An example of this, is the main character drinking the water from a bath that his friend has taken. Which is rather gross, but in the context of the movie and the sheer amount of scene that shared this same kind of motif, they fall flat in actually having any impact because they were included just to make the movie seem more taboo than it is in reality. 

It seems the movie is a more main stream gateway into the world of homoerotic obbsession and dark academia media. It is not very profound, and based on its clear similarities to works that had come out decades before it, it is not very orginal either. It does not cary the same eerie and disturbing feeling that one feels when watched the 1990's adaptation of The Talented Mr.Rripley, and it does not bring about the same insights into human connection that is brought through reading Brideshead Revisited. 

Because of all of this culminating, the movie was very surface level to me and did not leave me with any feelings at all, besides a distain for it.