Easy Rider (film): I'm not understanding why this film is so highly rated

For the most part, I tend to agree with ratings on major review sites that are more than 70% or 7/10 but in the case of the 1969 film Easy Rider I do not agree at all. This movie is rather famous and many professional critics have it listed as one of the top 100 films of all time. It took me until yesterday to finally get around to watching it and honestly, I can't really understand how anyone could be enthusiastic about this film.

Seeing the 3 big names in this film, I half expected to watch a piece of cinematic history that perhaps lead to all of them becoming super famous as they are today. What I got was a rather boring piece of cinema that appears as though it was made by someone attending film school at some overpriced inner-city art school. Despite the big names in this, particularly Dennis Hopper (who also directed the film) and Jack Nicholson, the acting is downright terrible and many of the scenes appear to be ad-libbed.

Basically Wyatt (Fonda) and Billy (Hopper) take off from L.A. to go to New Orleans as their destination taking in the scenery from their bikes along the way and do a bunch of drugs before getting back on the bikes and carrying on. They encounter a wide array of people along the way, and make a bunch of friends with the awful dialogue that takes place. Along the way they meet a bunch of people that for some reason don't like people that ride motorcycles and the attitudes the encounter get more and more discriminatory the further south they go.

They are denied rooms at motels only to be welcomed in by a hippie commune a few days later. The dialogue is just as bad at both locations with the primary irritant being Billy, played by Dennis Hopper, who just hoots and howls any ol' nonsense at apparently any opportunity.

I guess you could say that I appreciate the fact that both of the main characters are really driving the motorcycles in what appears to be all of the scenes. That probably wouldn't be possible these days because of all the rules that we have in filming.

I honestly couldn't understand the high ratings this barely watchable piece of cinema so I looked it up and one of the reasons that is listed as why this film is held in such high regard is because many people believe that the roaming nature of the plot is meant to perfectly capture what it is like to be on the road on motorcycles. Having never participated in such a thing is possibly why I disagree with this being a good film but at the same time I have a hard time believing that most professional critics have experienced that either.

The scenery and music is good, I'll give them that.

I was impressed with the fact that the film cost a mere $400,000 to make and ended up pulling in $60 million globally at the box office. It has no doubt brought in much much more than that over the years with other fees that would be collected for any TV station or streaming service to feature it in their programming.

Apparently the movie industry declined to pick up this film so Hopper just made it himself independently and nobody could understand why it was successful. This resulted in the film industry having an introspective moment about their own ability to gauge what it is that the public actually wants, only to gamble on another one of Hopper's ideas and have it completely bomb. The rights to the name were acquired and an attempt at a sequel was done in 2012 and it too completely failed.

Should I watch it?

Well that trailer very well encapsulates what the entire film is all about. It's basically a very long music video where the dialogue that happens is of very little consequence.

I hesitate to tell people to avoid this and will admit that maybe the cultural and historical importance of this film is just beyond my grasp to understand. Apparently it is an important time in history as far as cultural attitudes were concerned and it also marked a point in Hollywood where producers started to change their opinions on what would get considered for mass release from that point forward.

I'll just go ahead and say that "I don't get it." But by all means, feel free to disagree with me seeing as how 70% of the people out there that have reviewed this seem to absolutely love it. I thought it was boring.