3 Ways to Beat "In the Tall Grass" (2019)

this video is sponsored by protonmail and I'll tell you all about that in a little while but for now let's talk about in the tall grass since the Lumiere brothers debut film of 1895 there have been an estimated 500,000 movies made across the world last year alone there were 871 movies released and that was just in North America but unfortunately it seems that in the year of our Lord 2019 we have finally run out of good ideas for movies I give you in the tall grass it's a movie about some people who get lost in some tall grass that's it that's the movie that is the beginning middle and end of this movie five hundred thousand movies it's all for everybody it's up okay we made all the movies hack it up everyone go oh now I know what you're gonna say you're gonna say film dick in the tall grass is way more complicated than just some people lost in tall grass and of course you'd be right it certainly is more complicated than that but in this case that is not a compliment in the tall grass started as a novella written by Stephen King and his son in 2012 and only now have we been given the pleasure for lack of a better word of seeing it on the stream screen of which I will now be getting into heavy spoiler territory the plot of in the tall grass is excessively convoluted but I will attempt and I do mean attempt to summarize it as concisely as possible at the center of the contiguous United States there is a field of grass that lures in victims and once they lose sight of the road they're unable to find their way back the couple we start with eventually discover other people in the field making for a total of seven characters if you include this dog and you definitely should because this dog has as much screen time as this human so you may as well we have brother and sister Cal and Becky Travis the father of Becky's unborn child and then the Humboldt family Natalie Tobin Ross and their dog at the center of the field is a large rock which apparently has a and sinister origins older than the hills probably was here before the glaciers came and carried the hills away whoever touches the rock gains the ability to navigate the field but they also no longer want to leave you touch that rock you'll know everything I know everything the grass knows including how to leave only you won't want to ross insists that everyone should touch the rock but when they refuse he attacks them ross chases them around the field and manages to kill natalie and cow and in the process reveals to cal that the field exists in a time loop and every day the same seven people enter the field and make the same mistakes over and over again travis eventually manages to kill ross but knowing that the time loop will just reset itself he sacrifices himself by touching the rock trapping himself there forever but allowing him to navigate the field he shows Tobin the way out of the field and tells him to stop the time loop from happening again at the end of the film Tobin manages to convince Cal and Becky from entering the field effectively ending the time loop and they all drive away happily ever after so in summary tallgrass evil rock murder in time loops and if you think my explanation didn't make any sense imagine what it was like having to watch this an absurd movie deserves an absurd solution and I realized that there were three very absurd ways that the characters didn't think of to escape the TEL field of grass and in so doing they could have survived without the death and suffering presented in the film but before I can get to those solutions first we need to consider what the conditions of the scenario are explaining these conditions should help to put the solutions in context and will also help to rule out solutions that wouldn't work so let's talk about the field the most obvious and alarming property of the field is that it changes and reorients itself on-the-fly characters seem right next to each other in one moment and hundreds of metres apart in the next even if you try to mark where you've been to orient yourself the field will undo it making navigation in the field completely impossible there is one important exception however the field does not move dead things and it seems like they really want you to know that the field doesn't move dead things it makes it easier to find yeah it doesn't move dead things you can find things but it's easier once they're dead in addition to staying put the dead things can also be used as a beacon for others the film shows that if you're standing near a dead thing and you call out other people will be able to accurately find you despite the movie harping on about how the dead things don't move it serves absolutely no purpose to the story whatsoever and if all this wasn't difficult enough the field is also sentient and is literally moving people around based on its own motivations or at least Ross interprets as much when he communes with the rock now what I really want to know is how did you get here because the rock wouldn't let you find us unless it wanted you to the field isn't moving people around randomly it's purposely moving them to wherever it wants them to be therefore there is no way to escape the field unless it wants you to the only people who are capable of navigating the field are those who touch the rock not only can they navigate the field they also know the whereabouts of everyone else as well as the location of the bordering Road as previously mentioned however those who touch the rock lose the ability to leave the field at all this ends up being the film solution to getting out of the field Travis sacrifices himself in order to navigate the field allowing Tobin to escape but ideally we'd like to find a solution that doesn't require any sacrifice another element of the field is that it exists in a time loop and for all intents and purposes this just means that the same people get lured into the field over and over again this does not mean that the same events repeat themselves only that the same people enter the field after some predetermined amount of time it is therefore theoretically possible for you to run into yourself in the field if you both survive long enough though this never happens in the film Becky does manage to call her past self in one scene but this appears to be a one-time deal and not a reliable way to pass on information and even in this one instance Becky doesn't listen to herself anyways although events to necessarily repeat themselves every loop since the people entering the field never change and each new person doesn't know what happened in past loops typically they end up making the same decisions leading to similar events you're thinking if you just turn left instead of right he could have gotten away from me in the garden of forking paths you didn't make any one choice you made every choice and they all led back to me the only people who know what happened in previous loops are those who touched the rock because the field is the only consistent witness of the events of each loop it's also alluded to that the characters in the film are in only one of many time loops and that other people are also trapped in the field but they're invisible to our characters and have no impact on the story so who cares oh and if you're thinking of burning down the field of grass it does rain periodically in the field and the ground is quite wet so that probably wouldn't work I'm also not going to talk about the grass people or the carvings in the rock or the baby-eating because those parts don't serve any purpose either but [Music] Oh hey there I was just floating through space and reading your emails since you left them unencrypted I see that you got your lab results back on that growth you have these pictures are very disturbing you know this probably wouldn't have happened if you had protonmail proton males an encrypted email service first developed by scientists working at CERN it offers end-to-end encryption which means that no one not even protonmail knows what's in your emails the basic version of proton mail is free to use and unlike other email services like Gmail proton mail will never sell your data to advertisers so unless you want me to keep reading embarrassing things in your emails like for example that you've got an audiobook of 50 shades of gray really click the link in the description to enjoy a truly secure way to send emails get it on Android iOS or PC and now back to the video so how do we beat the the grass from in the tall grass as you may expect I'm moving with such a unique premise deserves a solution that is equally unique the first of which is to pick up this dead dog now I know what you're thinking film in this dog isn't dead and you'd be right it's not dead yet [Music] [Applause] so now it's just a simple matter of picking up the dead dog and carrying him across the field we bring up the second dog as you can tell by my e this is an incredibly easy thing to do we know two things first of all the grass doesn't affect dead things which means their location remains constant secondly we know that anyone who is near the dead thing also becomes immune to the field spatial antics because when Tobin is near the dead dog he's able to call out to Becky Cal and Travis and all three of them are able to find Tobin despite them all being in separate locations this suggests that the dead dog is anchoring Tobin in the same way they can hear him calling from a real location and none of the fields previous shenanigans take place theoretically then you should be able to pick up a dead thing and become immune to the fields movement effects all they need to do is start walking in any direction and eventually they would make it out of the field because when they're near a dead thing the field should act like a regular patch of grassland it isn't endless and they should be able to find their way to an edge of course this isn't a guarantee it's possible that when Tobin called to the other three characters the field just wanted them to find each other and it had nothing to do with a dead dog the dead thing rule may also not work if you start moving it but the characters didn't even give this a try despite it being one of the only possible ways to orient yourself in the field I mean it's probably worth a shot right another possible solution that the movie's heavily suggests is also given by the dog but during one of the loops where the dog is still alive here we go they're on the road Oh as a whole a way out you think that's it oh maybe unfortunately the characters are too busy fighting each other to take advantage of their first and only real opportunity to escape the field Ross then catches up to them and the opportunity is gone forever but if they stopped being morons for 20 seconds they could have escaped through the hole or at least theoretically one could make the argument however that this hole in the field contradicts what Ross said earlier because the rock wouldn't let you find us unless it wanted you to to me to suggest that the rock doesn't let the uninitiated from going anywhere it doesn't want them to go which means that for whatever reason the rock led the dog out of the field in this instance the characters may have been able to escape here just like the dog did but it's equally likely that the field wouldn't have let them or at least in my opinion so an even better and much more stupid solution is to give Tobin a piggyback ride now I realize this is a reach but it would technically work given what's shown in the film every single time the field changes the location of the characters it's because the characters broke line of sight with the object when Becky and Cal jumped into the air and then came back down again they saw each other at a further distance the second time but they didn't see the other person zooming away from them or teleporting away nothing changed until they broke line of sight with each other when Travis starts marking the grass to find his way back it unravels itself the second he stops looking at it even the Sun moves when he takes his eyes off of it a similar thing happens to Tobin when he sees the bowling alley in the distance the second time they looked for it it disappears from the horizon in the most extreme case the dog goes behind a piece of grass and suddenly appears next to the road all because the characters lost line of sight with the dog the characters interpret this as a possible way out of the field but I think it was just the field changing something as the line of sight was broken follow me but stay close whatever you do don't lose sight of me okay and if the field changes things when the line of sight is broken then the obvious solution is to ever break line-of-sight if they put Tobin on someone's shoulders and Tobin is able to find the church steeple on the horizon all he needs to do is stare at the church and never take his eyes off of it that way the field won't change anything and they'll be able to walk to it and get to the road of course Tobin eventually has to blink which would break the line of sight unless he blinks one eye at a time so the solution then is to give Tobin a piggyback ride while he constantly winks until they make it to the road and yes I realized that this is a stupid solution but the movie is about a field of grass so I think the solution is on par but if you have a better idea and you think you know how to beat in the tall grass please let us know about it in the comments below a huge thank you to my patrons and if you want to be as sick as them head on over to patreon dot-com slash film herald every month we do a raffle for a free item of merchandise which means they'll be the first to get their hands on these new shirts thanks for watching and until next time this has been the film Harold [Music]

Channel: Film Herald

Views: 3,690,602

Rating: 4.8932681 out of 5

Keywords: film, herald, movie, in the tall grass, netflix, review, analysis, how to beat, tall grass, rock, baby

Id: -lJg3ddJpYU

Length: 14min 43sec (883 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 07 2019