| F | Fantastic Fest 2023 |
On the plus side, Scott Bakula played a supporting role. On the minus side, everything else.
This was the most self-indulgent crap I’ve seen in a long time. The writer/director was so in love with his own visuals it wasn’t funny, or interesting. I have no idea why he chose to use very grainy black-and-white film. He definitely lingered on many scenes, sometimes having characters stick around for far too long for god knows why (oh, yeah, to keep these visuals going). Although this is set in our future, the technology is all old (early model laptops, video tapes instead of digital recordings, …). Strangely a mostly stop-motion fight scene at the end, presumably because he couldn’t figure out how to stage it using practical or digital effects? And the party scene? Wouldn’t it be neat if we showed everyone taking the miracle drug all throughout as if it were a recreational drug rather than a medication that probably has a prescribed dosage and no hallucinogenic or euphoric side effects? All style and no sense…
Script-wise: bleah. The science fiction premise is loosely laid out at the beginning. There are a lot of weird characters behaving strangely, not like human beings at all (like the cult of women who mostly just stand in lines at attention while their leader lectures them). With lots of “thank god that happened or we wouldn’t have a movie” moments. (A woman decides to fuck the guy who is going to be kidnapped just in time so he does not see the security alert on his computer about the intruders. Is it because she’s in on the plot? No, just good timing. Or the flashing/beeping buttons on the high-tech console at the end of the movie that, when pressed, give another woman—and us, the audience—the right amount of information to understand what’s going on. Plus having that other video tape queued up to just the right spot for even more information when she randomly decides to push it into the player. Egad.)
Steven Soderbergh is listed as a producer, and I mean his name is plastered all over the opening and end credits and will no doubt be on the poster. I feel like even the other producers know this movie is a hard sell so they’re using every tool they can. I kind of want to ask what dirt someone had on Soderbergh to get him involved…
Okay, now I’m beating a dead horse as if I can drive it across the finish line. I would have walked out of this film halfway through, but that’s hard to do at Alamo Drafthouse before they drop off your check. For you, I recommend not even walking in.
