Review

I absolutely love 12AM. I've seen it probably around 5 or 6 times now. It's a prime example of a subgenre of movies that I adore. Which is "drama where a group of people in a small confined setting gradually get more and more tense as a situation causes them to come into conflict." Cube being another good example of what I mean. Small setting, small group of people, things get more and more tense as the characters argue, particular focus on dialogue. Something about it just gets to the core of something I love about movies. Characters forced to come into conflict and reach a resolution.

I feel the same way about bottle episodes in TV. A bottle episode is generally meant to be a cost-saving measure. You limit your setting physically and only involve the core members of your cast (sometimes only a small subset of them). Doing that lets you save a lot of money for other episodes. These are your "characters trapped in a room argue with each other and come to a deeper understanding about their relationship while waiting for rescue." When they're done well, I think they're phenomenal. The format of the bottle episode is intended to save money, but it forces you to flex your writing muscles. You have to lean almost entirely on that aspect of the show/movie. So when you get a particularly good writer doing one, you can move past a lot of outward fluff and get to the core of character development. So it goes with 12AM, a movie focused entirely on its characters. We get a good sense of the personality of each juror and have a pretty good idea as to the details of the crime committed while never seeing it ourselves. Great stuff.