With Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery now streaming on Netflix, viewers might be curious how much they need to know about the original Knives Out to enjoy the film. Well, here’s the good news: You don’t need to watch the first movie to enjoy the “sequel.” The only connective tissue is Daniel Craig, who plays genteel southern detective Benoit Blanc. In fact, we can confirm that Glass Onion doesn’t even reference the first movie at all. There’s a brief moment in the film where one of Blanc’s previous cases is mentioned, but it is not the murder mystery at the heart of Knives Out. You can go into Glass Onion completely cold.
To drive that point home, writer/director Rian Johnson recently revealed that he’s not thrilled with Knives Out being forced into the title for Glass Onion. Via The Atlantic:
I’ve tried hard to make them self-contained. Honestly, I’m pissed off that we have A Knives Out Mystery in the title. You know? I want it to just be called Glass Onion. I get it, and I want everyone who liked the first movie to know this is next in the series, but also, the whole appeal to me is it’s a new novel off the shelf every time. But there’s a gravity of a thousand suns toward serialized storytelling.
In other words, think of Glass Onion as an Agatha Christie novel, which were an inspiration for Knives Out. Yes, they star the same detective, but unlike the Marvel movies or Star Wars, you don’t need to know anything else to enjoy the story. There’s no dense canon or lore, just the game unfolding before you.
Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery is available for streaming on Netflix.
(Via The Atlantic)
