Was Snake Eyes too early or too late? One thing we know: It was not on time. The 1998 conspiracy thriller was absolutely pilloried by critics. Roger Ebert said it was “the worst kind of bad film: the kind that gets you all worked up and then lets you down, instead of being lousy from the first shot.” Entertainment Weekly’s Owen Gleiberman gave it a D, concluding his vicious pan by crowning its director Brian De Palma the “masturbator of suspense.”
In recent years, Snake Eyes has been somewhat reclaimed by a generation of cinephiles more entranced by pure cinema than by story and character. No filmmaker is in love with the tools of filmmaking like De Palma, who was worshiped by the other mavericks of New Hollywood—Lucas, Spielberg, and Scorsese—for his knowledge and acumen. In his suspense films, many of which are heavily influenced by Alfred Hitchcock, De Palma luxuriates in POV shots, unreliable narrators, split screens, split diopters, and dutch angles. Best of all, these techniques are not, as Gleiberman accused, masturbatory. They all serve his voyeuristic obsession. In one way or another, all of his films are about watching.
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