The Star (2024)

After trailer - WOW! After actual series - WTF?!

There are many independent production teams that don't have many sponsors or rely on YouTube subscribers donations. There are also many BL movies/series/mini-series worth watching despite apparent small budgets or newbies actors. Unfortunately, The Star is not one of them, and here's why.

Good cinematography is largely about money. Production team, actors, equipment, etc. all require some resources - without that, not a move. You just need money to make a series. But if you think the main problem here is a small budget - better think twice.

For me, the failure of this series is the wrong business decisions. When the trailer consisting of super hot 18+ scenes was released, I thought The Star could aspire to be the hottest series of the year (!). But then I noticed that it's not a series just a movie, which means that international viewers will have to wait several months from the day of release. Tough luck, I'll wait. Then it was change - from a movie it became a mini-series: 2x25 min, and I was like: WTF? How can a movie be edited into two short episodes?

The story itself had potential, but the creativity here was lacking. The lousy first 25 minutes do not encourage you to watch the second part, which (note!) is only 17 minutes long. Why? The remaining promised 8 minutes are "exclusive content" available only to subscribers of the company's YouTube channel at certain levels. You need to pay at least 7(?) dollars to see what they have prepared for us. And guess what? I'm all for supporting young creators and actors as much as possible. Their work is sometimes worth more than the "works" released by well-known studios. But this 8 minutes content - it's just not worth it. This is not an uncut episode as one might expect. It's 8 minutes of cut NC scenes that couldn't appear on YouTube. Yes, the notable sexy scene from the trailer is also there.

If you've already seen The Star - I'm sorry you had to watch it. If you haven't yet - let it go. The low budget stings all the way through, But even money won't help if you don't know how to make the narrative interesting. The actors give it their all, but the dull script, weird editing and general lack of sense don't help the reception of this series. There's nothing interesting here, and it's not a matter of difficult subject matter as some claim, it's more of a really bad execution.

Perhaps I had too high expectations, but this is completely not what I expected. The Star turned out to be one of those productions you look forward to, only to rub your eyes in amazement later, wondering: what am I even watching? It seems that all the potential of the series was stolen by the one-and-a-half-minute trailer, the rest is better left out of silence.

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too much of an unlikable character

Overall: I'm generally more lenient on indie productions; however, Wayufilm has been making short movies for several years and they have had some that I enjoyed so I know what they are capable of. However, in this "The Star" they spent the first 20 minutes with a character who was such a jerk to another character that was a complete doormat. Then in the second part, there was a very fast mostly off screen redemption arc. We didn't get to really see their relationship develop/sweet moments. I did appreciate their frank conversation and the condom in the second part. And I understand why the NSFW scenes needed to be cut on YouTube though it made the second part feel choppy.

Aired in 2 parts for a total of about 45 minutes on Wayufilm's YouTube channel https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLOA6_oQmuXGBm-k0qjRmKX3mZLev2M7do&si=ldSLP6IMp8PTcYJf

Content Warnings: bullying, manhandling, threats

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