Unpopular Opinion On Citizen Kane

(Sorry that I didn't have a post yesterday. Very busy Easter Sunday for me. Will get some more up today.)

I always get excited to watch older classic films that I've never seen before and one of the movies I was the most excited to see was the 1941 Orson Welles classic Citizen Kane. Many people consider it to be one of the greatest film ever made if the THE greatest (I believe it was Roger Ebert's favorite film as well). So I watched it last week and once the film ended I thought "Really? This is the greatest masterpiece of all time?"

I was so bored throughout most of the film. I can appreciate older black and white films like The Wizard Of Oz (Though it's not all black and white), Psycho, Rear Window, etc, but they still have to be good well paced films. To me Citizen Kane wasn't. It starts off pretty well with the death of Charles Kane and us learning about his history through the newsreel montage. But after that the movie becomes so painfully slow. I can love a good slow paced film (Modern ones like King's Speech and older ones like Rear Window), but if you're going to do that you have to make sure it's done well and the scenes don't drag out for too long. And for me, a lot of the scenes in Citizen Kane just went on for way too long and could've been easily shorten to improve the pacing while still keeping those scenes effective and important.

Most of the acting isn't great here either aside from Orson Welles. I get it was made in the 40's and acting was different back then compared to now, but I could still tell it wasn't great. This was the first film for many of the actors and it shows.

I will say that it's a brilliantly edited film though. Not just with the newsreel opening, but most of the scene transitions are brilliant, effective, and creative (Especially for 1940's standards).

And with the Rosebud ending, I'll admit that I unfortunately found out about the ending before seeing the film and I probably would've had a different reaction had I went in totally blind. But early spoilers don't effect my overall thoughts on the film. Even if I didn't know that Rosebud was his sled, I still wouldn't have cared because I wasn't into the film or it's characters.

So yeah, that's my unpopular opinion on Citizen Kane. We all have some films that many people love that we just don't get (This and the original Halloween are those films for me). And I'm not trying to say that people are wrong for loving this film while I don't. All film is subjective and I'm very happy this is a classic for the majority of people.

What do you think of the film? Overrated or Flawless? Comment and let me know. And thanks for reading. :0)