Garshua

I wanted this movie to bewilder me. I wanted to scour YouTube for fan theories and talk for weeks about what this or that might mean. This was made by a very talented 20 year old but a child nonetheless, who felt the need to explain every single thing and was deathly afraid of having his version of this Internet folklore misinterpreted. A 500 word assignment turned into a feature film I’m afraid. It was surreal to see the backrooms on the big screen and I did get some good scares. But this film is like whatever. Could have been so much more if it would just say so much less.

This is a fundamentally and insidiously evil film. I wish this was a bit. But it’s not! This movie tries to make the world that we live in bearable. *Toy Story 5* says that technology is a fact of life and there’s healthy ways to use it to form genuine human connection. However, this film also takes the associated military and surveillance complexes that technology in real life is so intertwined with and presents them in a rosy, palatable way. To children. Drones tugging at heartstrings and AI in throwaway jokes made me feel sick. To call a film like this indoctrination is to do it a disservice. To call it propaganda is inaccurate. This work, while in progress, was a symptom of a sick society. Now that it’s out in the world it is going to be one of the causes as well. And also the movie is not very good. The pacing in the first act is messy as fuck and none of the established characters from previous films except Jessie are given a treatment that would lead anybody to give a single fuck about them. The queering/princess-coding of Buzz Lightyear is not enough to save this movie or make it worth watching, except as a study in how queerness is used to prop up the ideologies and methods of power in art. This movie is bad and also evil. The existence of *Top Gun* proves evil movies can be good. There is no excuse!

If this movie had been more camp or less stupid it could have been good but as it is it just is the way it is.

I regret not falling asleep sooner in the film. Without a doubt one of the worst movies I have ever seen. Absolutely flat and un-fun, not even deigning to be sincere in its possibilities for whimsy.