Trevor Ford

Written by Aaron Sorkin. Directed by Rob Reiner. 😃 Written by Aaron Sorkin. Directed by Danny Boyle. 😃😃 Written by Aaron Sorkin. Directed by David Fincher.  😃😃😃 Written by Aaron Sorkin. Directed by Aaron Sorkin.  😔

A movie about posting through it. Most movies like this are about trying to stop a disaster before it spirals out of control. Some say this is a satire of our times like Dr. Strangelove. Some say it’s a satire of satire itself. I think something far more cynical is at play. In Iñárritu’s worldview, our complete, reckless destruction of our only home is far too tragic to make jokes about. That’s why the jokes in the movie are rarely actually funny. Because it isn’t funny that we are burning our house down while we’re all still inside and we kept electing leaders who insist on locking the doors.  Iñárritu understands the disaster can’t be averted because it has already occurred. We are merely trapped in the slow moving fallout. There’s nothing to fix. All we can do is adapt and hang on. And if we’re going to do that we might as well make art about it that brings people together. Why suffer alone when we can suffer together and lighten the load? That’s what makes the twist so compelling. We’re not watching the disaster unfold. We’re watching a play being performed about the disaster many years after the fact. Rather than watch the man who caused all this reckon with his choices, grow, change, and avert the crisis in a moment of triumph, we witness artists reckoning with the merits of dramatizing the events.  Do the men who broke the world deserve lionization? What the artists at work think is irrelevant, because the play is being paid for by the descendants of the men who broke the world. It doesn’t matter that the version of events depicted in the production isn’t even really accurate to what actually transpired. Money talks, and it’s what the money wants. It’s all cope anyway. The actors are free to not work if they so choose. Art and patronage have always gone hand in hand. What happens to art when it is controlled by patronage? Another metatextual layer.  I genuinely don’t think I’ve ever seen a movie like this. A big, bold, audacious feat of filmmaking. The twist is insane, unlike any I’ve ever seen. It hoodwinks the viewer, makes a fool out of them. “You thought you knew what this movie was? HAHAHAHA! Fuck you.” A lot of people do not like that feeling and if you don’t then you will probably have a hard time with this movie. As for me, I loved it. I never saw it coming and it totally swept me away. The production design and VistaVision cinematography are breathtaking. The whole thing feels luxurious from the clothes to the rooms. The $180 million budget is on full display.  Tom Cruise hits the pedal to the metal right from the jump and never stops, here to remind us that our Greatest Movie Star is also a fucking great actor. The standout scene sits right in the middle of the film when “Digger” is placed on “trial” in front of the world’s nations. Cruise launches into a 10 minute monologue to defend and justify his actions. He never stops talking, never stops moving. It’s an astounding piece of acting and filmmaking. Cruise and the entire production are firing on all cylinders. To say nothing of John Goodman having the time of his life as the president in a satire of our gerontocracy, or Riz Ahmed, or the guy from Robocop 3 as the sniveling SecDef. And it’s always nice to see Michael Stuhlbarg. “Digger’s” defense lays bare the harshest truth: yes, he destroyed the world, but only because we asked for it. We demanded electricity to power our lives and he provided the fuel to make the electricity. Is he responsible for destroying the world? Or are we? Is he the greedy one? Or is it us, the glutinous masses who demand better from our overlords but do nothing to change ourselves? Not everything works. Iñárritu’s zaniness gets a little unwieldy at times and the plot becomes hard to follow. The transitions between the play and the real world are so jarring as to feel surreal, and the balance between them is a bit off. I would love to spend more time in the dystopian world, but I doubt that’s what Iñárritu was really concerned with. But the film’s ideas are so grand, the message so urgent, the swings so big, that it’s easy to look past its flaws. It’s already grown in my estimation just over a couple days thinking about it. As my friend Nick said, the irony of a movie like this is the sickos will love it, but it was made to wake up the general masses who will not see it. It will be ripe for reclamation inside 10 years. Fossil Fools is a play about the world’s richest man, being paid for by his nephew, a tech billionaire whose company makes money by controlling and suppressing information. Digger is a movie about a play about the world’s richest man, financed by a company that was purchased by a tech billionaire who is gobbling up all of the social media, cable news, movie, and TV studios. He says he’s not trying to control the media, but we’ve heard they before. As the graffiti on the wall says as the credits roll: compliance is freedom.

Sometimes horror lets directors talk about things like trauma and grief be sometimes horror lets a director shoot an 11 year old girl in the face with a shotgun. One of the things I loved about this was how Creggor employs video games tropes like first person shots, weapon inventory management, leveling up, boss fights, etc. but it never feels like you’re watching a video game being played. It’s a delicate balance and Creggor nails it.  I’ve been saying for decades that the main reason video game adaptations don’t work is because the people who make them were too old to have grown up playing video games. Finally the time has come for people who grew up playing games as kids and teenagers in the 2000s to make movies about them in a way that’s intuitive and makes sense and what a difference it makes. I’m not a huge Resident Evil person but when I first learned this wasn’t going to be an adaptation of one of the game stories but rather an original story set in that world my concern was, if you removed any references to Resident Evil, would you know this was a Resident Evil movie? I came away thinking yes. Which just goes to show: never listen to nerds.

I read the book when it came out and loved it. Sir Ridley is pushing 90 and has been basically 50/50 for 20 years on his work being good or terrible. The trailers looked mid and everyone I know who saw it did not like it. So perhaps it’s the soft bigotry or low expectations but I liked it a lot more than I thought it would.  Even in his dotage Ridley can direct the shit out of something and I thought it looked great and was pretty solidly executed barring some pacing issues. If this had come out 10 years ago during Peak Zombie it probably would have made $500 million. Something weird though is Jacob Elordi just isn’t old enough for the main character. In the book Hig is in his late 30s/40s. He had a wife and a whole life before the world went tits up. Elordi is 28 lol. Honestly Brolin is the better fit for the main character, but Elordi and Qualley are gorgeous so I had no issue in the end looking at them for two hours.  Brolin rocks and he gets center stage for the single biggest action sequence of the whole movie which kicks ass. Ridley can still get it done when he needs to. SPOILER  The single craziest departure the movie takes from the book is it kills the dog. In the book the dog dies of old age after a long happy life. To just straight up have him die pretty early on is crazy work.