Taika Waititi dismisses Klara and the Sun critics as ‘failed artists’ after scathing reviews - The Independent

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Taika Waititi has called critics of his latest film “sad lost souls” who failed to achieve their dreams of becoming artists, after his adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun received a string of scathing reviews.

The Oscar-winning director took aim at reviewers on social media, with an image that pointed out the difference between the film’s critic score and audience responses.

“I haven’t read a review of anything aimed at me or my peers in almost 15 years. But I do listen to the people,” Waititi wrote. “So this Halloween, let’s spare a thought for those sad lost souls who couldn’t achieve their dreams of becoming artists, and thus settled, and became critics. The same people who also hated Jojo Rabbit.”

In his 2019 black comedy Jojo Rabbit, Waititi played an imaginary version of Adolf Hitler who befriends a young boy growing up in Nazi Germany. The film faced some questions at the time about using humour and satire to tackle Nazism, but it was overall well-received, with an 81 per cent critics' score on Rotten Tomatoes and winning Waititi the Academy Award for best adapted screenplay.

He ended his post about Klara and the Sun’s critics with the words: “Irrelevant. Out of touch. Obsolete. In the bin.”

Klara and the Sun, set in a dystopian future where androids are sold as companions for humans, stars Jenna Ortega as Klara, an Artificial Friend whose life changes when she is bought by Josie (Mia Tharia), a teenager whose health is deteriorating after undergoing a controversial genetic enhancement procedure.

As Klara tries to understand the human world and the meaning of love, she becomes increasingly devoted to Josie and sets out to help her, while grappling with the grief and tensions within the teenager’s family.

The film opened to particularly harsh reviews after its premiere at the BFI London Film Festival earlier in October, and currently sits at a 26 per cent critics’ score on Rotten Tomatoes, compared with a 78 per cent audience rating.

The Independent’s chief film critic Clarisse Loughrey gave the film two stars, describing the film as “both a betrayal of Ishiguro’s quiet, meditative vision and a poor imitation of Waititi’s own, pre-Marvel work”.

“To take Ishiguro’s story and rob it of its central character’s incisive, observational nature, is to inhabit this strange and prescient world while keeping its eyes glued firmly to the floor. The book was about who we fundamentally are, now and tomorrow. The film is about the power of love and friendship. That seems like quite the downgrade,” she wrote.

The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw called the film a “a sentimental and laborious mess”, while The Telegraph’s Tim Robey suspected it “might be the most infantile film of the year”.

Speaking about the challenge of adapting the novel while retaining his own style, Waititi told Variety last month: “The book is not funny. There’s some humorous moments in it, just the way that Klara sort of misinterprets things, or just certain ways she sees the world, which I think as a reader, you’re like, ‘Oh, that’s sweet and innocent and funny.’”

He continued: “I wanted to make sure that I brought my own tone that I usually do to my films into this, but I didn’t want to mess too much with the actual sort of overall tone of how the book reads, because it is really beautiful, that book.

“It’s, you know, a slow burn and on the surface, not much happens. It’s just so much bubbling away underneath.”

Klara and the Sun has had a disappointing theatrical performance in the US, earning $701,059 during its opening weekend and a further $145,000 in its second weekend. Made on a reported budget of $20m, the film has brought in approximately $1.74m worldwide, according to Box Office Mojo.

Sony had initially planned to release it in around 1,900 US cinemas, but scaled back that number to 880 before its opening weekend after early reviews began to drop.

The film’s planned theatrical release in Spain has also been cancelled, according to Spanish publication Hobby Consolas, which stated that the decision followed the film’s poor box-office performance and negative reviews.