One of the more diabolical trends in recent film promotion & distribution has been the decrease in access to premiere screenings for professional critics in favor of inviting online influencers instead. The thought is that the younger, less journalistic influencer crowd is more likely review a new movie favorably than a traditional critic—especially when buttered up with parties, booze, and merch—so studios can effectively purchase cheap advertising by elbowing the old-world press out of the way to make room for the brats. Being neither a paid critic nor a young upstart with a substantial online following myself, I’ve never experienced that kind of blatant buttering-up first-hand, but I did get a small taste of it at last weekend’s local premiere of the microbudget documentary Holding Back the Tide at The Broadside. The ticket price for the screening included a Happy Hour icebreaker where local shuckers supplied unlimited raw oysters for the crowd to slurp down in excess, supposedly as a live demonstration of the shell-recycling program helmed by The Coalition to Restore Costal Louisiana, which has been repurposing shells from local bars & restaurants to rebuild the state’s eroding coastline. No matter how many helpful CRCL representatives were around to answer questions via personal interaction or post-film panel discussion about the recycling program, I could clearly see the truth; those oysters were a bribe – a bribe far more valuable than any Los Angeles red carpet meet-and-greet with the voice cast of Mufasa. They put the audience in a euphoric mood that was impossible to break.
In all seriousness, Holding Back the Tide does pair extraordinarily well with pre-screening oysters, since half of the movie’s credibility relies on a shared understanding that oysters are an exquisitely delicious treat. Once you agree to that premise, all the movie has to do is explain that they are also an admirable political tool & role model, as exemplified locally by CRCL’s Oyster Shell Recycling Program. This is not a talking-heads advocacy doc so much as it’s an invitation to mediate on the nature of the oyster as a divine organism for 77 breezy minutes, best enjoyed with the mollusks’ briny taste still lingering on your tongue. It walks a thin line between poetry and incoherence, but it also makes a convincing enough argument that oysters deserve that awestruck aspiration. By the time this seafood industry documentary ends on a heartfelt dedication “to The Queer Future,” it earns a hearty “Right on,” from its audience. At that point, we’ve touched on the oyster’s relationships with and answers to political subjects as wide-ranging as Climate Change, gender identity, communal solidarity, racial justice, and capitalistic overconsumption – each with seemingly enough contextual history worthy of their own standalone doc. Oyster farmers, vendors, shuckers, and scientists pontificate about their collective fav in fragmentary interviews, focusing mostly on the oyster’s significance to the life & history of New York City. This hands-on academia is counterbalanced by a more metaphorical appreciation of the oyster’s tendency to change genders mid-life to maintain social balance, as voiced & modeled by trans performers who personify the little wonders.
Holding Back the Tide is resistant to linear explanations of the oyster’s significance to NYC culture, choosing instead to mimic the circular, repetitive structure of human breath or crashing waves. Its imagery can be abstract to the point of counterproductivity, such as its gorgeous underwater photography of subway cars being used to restore coastal reefs along with humanmade, recycled oyster beds – which are seen but not verbally explained. When a seemingly cis-het couple orally exchange an oyster back & forth Tampopo-style, then emerge from the experience as a different pair of lesbian actors, their literalized transformation into The Queer Future is just as confused as it is corny. However, the living-tableau recreation of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus in an oversized oyster shell, reworked as a portrait of modern transgender beauty, is one genius image among many, with clear thematic intent. It’s especially easy to get on board with the movie’s religious exaltation of the oyster as a Louisianian familiar with its pleasures as a seasonal delicacy and its uses in coastal hurricane protection, maybe even more so than for the average New Yorkers in the target audience. Love for the oyster is something you feel more than it is something you can articulate, like the stupefying awe for rocks expressed in Deborah Stratman’s recent film Last Things. Holding Back the Tide is less abrasive & challenging than Stratman’s film, calling back to the more playful 90s NYC indie filmmaking of a Fresh Kill than anything so academically experimental. Its love for the oyster is raw & heartfelt, and it wants to be shared to its audience so badly it sometimes comes with a real-life oyster bar to help supplement the experience.
When questioned on why the lighting & color grading of Wicked: Part 1 was so muted & chalky when compared to the Technicolor wonders of the classic MGM adaptation of The Wizard of Oz, director Jon M. Chu explained that he wanted to “immerse people into Oz, to make it a real place […] Because if it was a fake place, if it was a dream in someone’s mind, then the real relationships and stakes that [the characters] are going through wouldn’t feel real.” Given the immense popularity of the film, I have to assume that most audiences understand the appeal of that desaturated, “real stakes” take on the movie musical and are hungry for more reality-bound singalongs just like it. Luckily, they do not have to wait an entire year for the arrival of Wicked: Part 2 to scratch that itch. Joshua Oppenheimer’s climate-change musical The End has arrived to immediately supply what the people demand: a drab, real-world movie musical with grim, real-world stakes. Set entirely in a single, secluded bunker after our impending global environmental collapse, The End is as grounded in reality as any musical has been since the semi-documentary London Road. The stakes are the continued survival of human life on planet Earth. The relationships are strictly parental or economic. Oppenheimer even has the good sense to luxuriate in a near three-hour runtime, just like the first half of Wicked. With an immersive approach like that, it’s sure to be a hit.
George MacKay stars as a twentysomething brat who’s spent his entire life sheltered from the apocalypse in his family’s luxurious bunker, located inside a salt mine. His only social interaction has been confined to his erudite parents and their small staff: a cook, a doctor, and a butler. Playing the mother, Tilda Swinton frets nervously with her fine-art home decor with the same sense of existential dread that she brought to Memoria. Playing the father, Michael Shannon maintains order & civility while grappling with his first-hand contributions to the environmental disaster as a vaguely defined executive in The Energy Business. The domestic fantasy of their life underground is disrupted by the arrival of a starving, haunted survivor of the world outside, played by Moses Ingram. The newcomer’s only potential place in the house is as a mate for McKay’s poorly socialized, brainwashed rich boy, which is not verbally acknowledged but weighs heavily on her every decision. Helpfully, every character confesses their internal emotional conflicts to the audience in song, which never escalates from patter to barnburner but at least adds a minor note of escapism to an otherwise grim, limited setting. The musical numbers are conversational, recalling the sung-through movie musical style of films like The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (or, more recently, Annette), except they’re much more sparingly deployed among the more traditional, reserved dialogue.
With The End, Oppenheimer has leapt from documentary to the deep end of narrative filmmaking: the movie musical. Or, at least, that’s what the movie musical should be. Jon M. Chu’s quotes about making Oz “a real place” where audiences can “feel the dirt” is entirely antithetical to the pleasures of movie musical filmmaking, a fundamental misunderstanding of the artform. By contrast, Oppenheimer appears to understand the artform but actively seeks to subvert it to make a political point. The End is a movie musical about the economics of surviving climate change; it only cares about the “real relationships” between the ultra-wealthy and their small staff within the terms of economic power & control. It speaks in Old Hollywood musical language but limits its setting to what would traditionally account for one isolated set-piece song & dance, contrasting the grandeur of the salt mine to the smallness of its characters’ hermetic world. I can’t say that he fully manages the discordance between movie magic & political doomsaying with anything near the success of his breakthrough triumph The Act of Killing, but The End is at least occasionally uncanny in an interesting, provocative way, as opposed to uncanny in a cowardly way. Anyone who’s praising Wicked for its political allegories about fascism & repression will surely find their next favorite musical in the new Oppenheimer film . . . unless everyone’s just needlessly making excuses for enjoying assembly-line Hollywood spectacle. Its current state requires many such excuses.
All of David Cronenberg’s children are now out there making Cronenberg movies. Eldest daughter Cassandra has several assistant-director credits that include the Cronenberg classic eXistenZ, and a slow trickle of high-style, high-concept sci-fi horrors have established son Brandon as a buzzy provocateur of his own right over the past decade. Now, Caitlin Cronenberg has entered the family business with her debut feature Humane. Set in a near-future America that’s struggling to keep its remaining citizens alive after Climate Change disaster, Humane‘s central hook relies on a government program that incentivizes voluntary euthanasia as a means of population control. The government has rebranded suicide as a heroic act of “enlisting” in “the war” against humanity’s extinction, littering the streets with propaganda posters that valorize impoverished parents who sacrifice themselves to brighten their children’s future with a hefty payout. It’s the kind of post-Twilight Zone thought experiment where the characters are more symbols than people, representing various social ills and grotesque points of view that help flesh out the central thesis more than flesh out their internal lives. In that way, Humane is maybe more indebted to the Canadian horror tradition of the Cube series than it is to the Cronenberg family legacy, give or take a couple last-minute indulgences in dental & bodily gore that cater to the true Cronheads out there. However, the film is surprisingly juicy if you’re invested in the larger Cronenberg nepo baby project, given that one of its major driving forces is catty, extratextual humor about spoiled brats who live in their famous father’s shadow.
Because it is a relatively cheap, made-for-streaming production, Humane cannot afford to depict the wide-scale Climate Crisis devastation that has accelerated America’s violent disdain for its own citizens. Instead, the movie shoehorns all of the political hot topics its premise touches on (class, racism, immigration, MAGA populism, COVID denialism, environmental collapse) into rushed conversations during a single-family dinner, only hinting at the wider scale misery of the world outside their home in gestural images (UV-deflecting umbrellas, bureaucratic death squads, newscasts warning of an imminent draft for the “war”). Peter Gallagher stars as the family figurehead: a retired, wealthy news anchor who invites his children to his home for dinner, where he announces that he and his wife plan to enlist as an act of self-sacrifice. His children loudly rebel, squabbling with their father about the narcissism of his decision as an act of familial PR and squabbling amongst each other about who deserves what share of their imminent inheritance. The movie takes a fun turn at the top of the second act that further isolates & escalates the fervor of that familial argument, and I refuse to spoil that twist here even though it arrives fairly early in the runtime. What’s much more important is the obliviousness & selfishness of the nepo babies who both loathe and profit from their father’s legacy, weaponizing phrases like “What would Dad think?” to knock each other down in their vicious fight for dominance. It’s darkly funny enough on its own merits to make Humane worth seeking out when it hits Shudder this summer, but it feels even more essential once you start extrapolating what it indicates about Caitlin Cronenberg’s home life (as filtered through collaboration with producer & screenwriter Michael Sparaga).
Not everyone will be interested in watching a feature-length subtweet about Cronenberg family gatherings, but I appreciated how Humane‘s rich-people-problems humor lightened up its political speculation about our planet’s grim future. I felt similarly about Brandon Cronenberg’s latest film Infinity Pool, which balanced out its broader satirical sci-fi premise about wealth-class privilege with the director’s extratextual nepo baby handwringing about imposter syndrome and writer’s block. Cronenberg’s kids could be making exact photocopies of their father’s legendary body horrors, but they’re instead undercutting that impulse with some acknowledgement & self-interrogation of their own creative, privileged circumstances. They’re also just having fun. I found Infinity Pool perversely hilarious and Humane surprisingly playful, especially in scenes featuring Enrico Colantoni as a bloodthirsty bureaucrat who interrupts the family dinner with plans to collect the bodies the government was promised. It’s a small film with big ideas, not allowing its Canadian TV production values to get in the way of its thematic ambitions. It’s also self-consciously silly, though, affording comedic actors Jay Baruchel & Emily Hampshire equal opportunity to play morbid court jesters alongside Colantoni as Gallagher’s rotten, ungrateful children. There’s a lot to enjoy here, and I hope Caitlin Cronenberg gets to leverage her last name for more high-concept satires in the near future. The only shame, really, is that we weren’t privy to the real-life dinner conversations that likely resulted after her family saw an early cut. They’re fun to imagine, at least.
Is there a sizable audience out there still steaming mad that the erotic firefighter sequences of Titane weren’t even gayer? João Pedro Rodrigues appears to believe so, as evidenced by his pornographic firefighter musical Will-o’-the-Wisp, which is being pitched at the dwindling crowd of arthouse shut-ins who remember that Titane even exists (i.e., losers like me who pay attention to “the news out of Cannes”). Or rather, its indulgence firefighter fantasia is shiny packaging meant to lure those art snobs into the theater. Once ensnared, Rodrigues sits us down for abstract academic pontification about climate change, racial justice, and outdated governmental power structures, which helps give the film a sense of political purpose beyond its initial novelty. Boiling Will-o’-the-Wisp down to any one genre or tone is a fool’s game; the arthouse curio is a one-stop-shop for art history lectures, environmentalist theory, gay pornography, rage-bait trolling, sitcom schtick, and interpretive dance – all in an hour’s time. I’m something of a fool, though, so I’ll do my best to condense & summarize by declaring the Titane stage musical sequence at its center to be is its most attention-grabbing tangent, which makes it an effective Trojan horse for the million other things on Rodrigues’s mind.
In the year 2069, an ineffective Portuguese king waits out his last few days of hospice before death, wistfully watching his great grandnephew play with a toy firetruck. The toy evokes the king’s most cherished memory: a time when he was a young, idealistic prince who abandoned his royal duties to join the local fire brigade. This decision is partly influenced by his royal parents’ indifference to the global disaster of climate change, listening to news reports of wildfires and their son’s recitation of Greta Thunberg’s “How Dare You” speech as mild annoyances instead of immediate crises. It’s also influenced by his childlike naivete, which approaches firefighter iconography and a mythical royal pine tree forest with the same awestruck fascination as the young grandnephew playing with the toy. Once in training, the prince grows up quick. He learns real-life, adult responsibilities & passions on the job, both physically combating the immediate effects of climate change and physically making love to his hot fireman instructor, a commoner hunk with impeccable abs. The prince’s ferocious joy for his new, meaningful life is expressed through song & dance in the film’s erotic centerpiece, which is why it’s such a betrayal when he quickly throws it away the second his meaningless “royal duties” call him back to the throne – where he gradually dies a pointless life.
The most important thing to understand about Will-o’-the-Wisp is that it’s a total troll job, a flippant provocation aimed at post-irony academics. It’s politically furious, eager to throw intellectual bombs at institutional failures to address climate change and at the roles race & class play in the romance between the white prince and his Black fireman hunk. It’s also seemingly resigned to the futility of attempting institutional change, throwing those bombs for self-amusement as the world burns to the ground regardless. Its indulgence in incendiary race-play kink and coronavirus death feel no more serious than its erotic CPR training, its gay-porno restagings of classical art, or the absurdly fake ejaculating dildos featured in its climactic 69 set piece. The Thunbergian urgency of its climate change activism is the only genuine impulse in its arsenal; it just also sees any response to the crisis beyond large-scale institutional disruption or intervention to be useless, amounting only to academic infighting. Maybe the idea behind the Titane musical sequence is a nihilist one, trying to find a little novelty & levity in the world before it melts away. A more generous reading is that it’s a novel attempt to draw attention to the urgency of a political issue that will kill billions of people if the wealth class who can afford to travel to Cannes don’t wake up and take charge.
In Bertrand Bonello’s 2016 political provocation Nocturama, a group of young, hip domestic terrorists set off a disparate series of homemade bombs in modern Paris, then await the state’s violent military response in a shopping mall. In Daniel Goldhaber’s How to Blow Up a Pipeline, a group of young, hip domestic terrorists set off two homemade bombs along a Texan desert pipeline, then await the state’s violent military response in the hot American sand. The Parisian kids never fully explain the reasoning behind their explosives beyond a vague sense of economic unrest & cultural ennui. The central point of Nocturama is making its teenage dissidents look cool—which it does—before they all meet a violent end. By contrast, the American kids explain the ideology behind their explosive Direct Actions at length, intending to disrupt the economic viability of crude oil as a means to slow down Climate Change. The point of How to Blow Up a Pipeline isn’t to inform the audience how to replicate this violence ourselves, but to motivate us to get serious about Climate Change as a mass extinction event that needs to be directly, immediately combated. Both films are structured as non-linear heist thrillers, joining their hip teen terrorists in the hours before their respective bombings before flashing back to the planning stages of those attacks. They both function as feature-length Building the Team montages as a result, which is always the most satisfying sequence in heist movies anyway. In contrast, the American version of Nocturama is less pretty & more explainy than the French one, but it’s also a much more useful political motivator, which counts for a lot in this context.
Goldhaber & crew do their best to make this Lefty manifesto traditionally entertaining so that its incendiary politics ignite the widest audience possible. This was never a concern of Bonello’s, who made a provocative aesthetic object to be appreciated by a small audience of art nerds. How to Blow Up a Pipeline uses retro synth scoring & 90s blockbuster fonts to disguise itself as a throwback to crowd-pleaser heist thrillers like Point Break, but its full-hearted advocacy of its climate activists’ property destruction is much more daring & modern than the genre’s cop-friendly past. Most of the shocking plot twists are the exact kind of undercover, double-crossing character reveals we’re used to in that context, but the movie loudly endorses the titular bombing and the activists behind it every chance it gets. The most Goldhaber & editor Daniel Garber shake up the traditional blockbuster heist film formula is by cutting away from explosions seconds before detonation to retreat into flashbacks, letting the tension ride for several minutes before returning to the Bruckheimerian balls of fire. Otherwise, it works within a familiar, comforting Dad Movie story template that this time just happens to be populated by pissed-off crust punks & college campus leftists. The tension of whether a homemade explosive will be jolted the wrong way by those nervous rioters before they reach their targeted pipeline is continuously effective in the moment, but it’s all in service of stringing the audience along to listen to the reason behind their planned property destruction in their downtime between backroom chemistry experiments.
It’s extremely shallow of me to compare Pipeline‘s cool-cred endorsement of violent political action to the much more nihilist, beauty-obsessed Nocturama, as if they’re the only two films of their kind. There’s a wide range of uncivil unrest advocacy cinema in this movie’s lineage, from 2018’s Empty Metal to 1983’s Born in Flames to 1966’s Battle of Algiers. It would also be shallow of me to assign an auteurist reading to its production, given that it’s officially credited as “a film by Daniel Goldhaber, Ariela Barar, Jordan Sjol, and Daniel Garber” (a list that includes the director’s co-writers and aforementioned editor). I’m going to do it anyway, though, because I’m a shallow guy. I appreciate that some of the paranoid technophobia from Goldhaber’s debut feature Cam bled through to this follow-up, represented in Pipeline by characters’ constant awareness of being surveilled via their smartphones, even when dormant. Still, I miss the slick, fantastical aesthetics of that indoor sex-work cyberthriller, which are traded in here for the grit & sweat of the outdoor American West. That cinematic preference for beauty & artifice over more practical, real-world concerns is likely why Nocturama was at the forefront of my mind throughout Pipeline. I felt as if I had already seen my ideal version of this picture in Bonello’s puzzle-box terrorist thriller, so even when admiring the big-picture politics & scene-to-scene tension of Goldhaber’s version, I could never fully crossover into zealous love for it. It’s a consistently entertaining, ideologically solid eco-activist thriller that never fully shook me out of my cowardly complacency as a passive political thinker & pop media consumer. Or, that’s at least what I want to convey to the FBI.
I can’t believe I let this happen. I got bored enough to wrestle the Cocaine Bear. After finding its trailers punishingly unfunny, I still checked out Elizabeth Banks’s animal attack horror comedy on the big screen, both because Boomer gave it a glowing review and because there was absolutely nothing else of interest in theaters last week. Cocaine Bear‘s violence is sufficiently vicious, and there’s some amusement in listening to Mark Mothersbaugh run rampant on the soundtrack trying to touch on every single style of 80s pop music except the one he was making at the time. It’s just a shame about those jokes; yeesh. I haven’t felt that alienated by an audience’s laughter since the last time I got dragged along to see a Deadpool. The “Can you believe how crazy this is??!!!” meme humor of Cocaine Bear might’ve spoken to me in the past, when I enjoyed similarly bad-on-purpose schlock titles like Zombeavers, Hobo with a Shotgun, and Turbo Kid, but lately I’ve cooled on the genre. My favorite parts were the brief flashes of sincere effort (the CG rendering of a maniac bear tearing into human flesh and the sounds of Mothersbaugh needlessly working overtime on the score), and I wish they were executed in service of something genuinely over-the-top instead of an incoherent 100-minute meme – the same complaint I recently had about the similar title-first-substance-second horror comedy All Jacked Up and Full of Worms. So, I left Cocaine Bear starving for the earnestly bonkers animal attack movie it failed to deliver, which I immediately found at home in the 1977 cult film Day of the Animals.
Day of the Animals follows the same faintly sketched-out story template of Cocaine Bear, in which a group of bland archetype hikers are terrorized by extraordinarily violent mountain animals driven mad by man’s follies. The titular Cocaine Bear goes on its own hyperviolent crime spree when it ingests large quantities of cocaine dumped into its habitat during a botched drug run. In Day of the Animals, the murderous beasts are crazed by a hole in the ozone layer, which the opening credits explain “COULD happen in the near future IF we continue to do nothing to stop this damage to Nature’s protective shield for life on this planet.” Our hikers in peril are torn to shreds by owls, buzzards, mountain lions, dogs, wolves, and bears, oh my. Besides the wider range of killer critters and the far more preposterous motivation for their bloodlust (I’ll leave it to you to deduce which of these two titles was inspired by a real-life news item), there isn’t much difference in the stories that Cocaine Bear & Day of the Animals tell. Still, the tactility & sincerity of the animal attacks in the 70s film go a long way in making it worthy of the ambling journey, even if only as a schlocky novelty. Leslie Nielsen’s casting as a violent, racist bully lurking among the chummier hikers is a great example of that difference, since after Naked Gun just one decade later his presence would’ve been reduced to a cheap, self-spoofing joke. Instead, he’s allowed to be a chest-thumping macho terror that goes just as broad & ridiculous as his career-defining mugging as Frank Drebin in the ZAZ films but heightens the film’s absurdity & menace instead of undercutting them. None of the dozens of disparate, disconnected performers in Cocaine Bear are given the same opportunity to play the scenario straight; they’re all tasked to repeatedly remind the audience it’s all just one big dumb joke with nothing more on its mind than the novelty of its title.
Director William Girdler knows a thing or two about bear attack movies, since his Jaws rip-off Grizzly is pretty much the standard bearer of the genre. There is indeed a real bear onscreen here, one who wrestles Nielsen’s macho brute to death once he’s exhausted all the possible ways he could be cruel to his fellow human beings (presumably because the hole in the ozone layer has also triggered his own worst animal instincts). There’s some humor in the dated staging of this attack, which includes shots of Nielsen aggressively hugging a stunt actor in a bear costume, but there’s also just enough legitimate bear-on-human contact to make it genuinely tense. In general, there’s something unnerving about the way Girdler’s crazed animals appear to leap out of his nature footage inserts, as if they’re crossing a forbidden barrier into reality to tear into the character actors (and, more often, their stunt doubles). I’ve never been kept so on edge by Ed Woodian stock footage reels, since they’re usually so disconnected from the physical action of the main narrative. So, yes, there are some laughably dated visual effects shots in Day of the Animals—most notably a moment of green screen surrealism as one archetypal character actor plummets off a cliff to her death while being pecked at by birds—but its mixed media approach includes enough frames of living, breathing animals sharing the screen with their actor & stunt double victims that the movie feels legitimately dangerous in a way that modern CGI never could.
No offense to Girdler, who between Grizzly and the blacksploitation Exorcist riff Abby has enough cult movie street cred on his own to dodge the comparison, but it’s incredible that Day of the Animals wasn’t directed by Larry Cohen. Its mix of scrappy practical effects, dangerous on-set stunts, and a premise so gimmicky it’s near-psychedelic (especially in the early shots of menacing sunbeams piercing the ozone layer to torment the animals below) are all worthy of Cohen’s most unhinged classics, which I mean as a high compliment. All that’s missing from the Cohen formula, really, is a bizarrely inhuman performance from Michael Moriarty, a role that Nielsen fills ably. If there’s anything that Day of the Animals might’ve benefited borrowing from Cocaine Bear, it might’ve been useful to smuggle some of its titular cocaine into the editing room. There’s an unrushed, stoney-baloney pacing to Day of the Animals that would’ve been much zanier & more streamlined just a few years later, if were made in the era when Elizabeth Banks’s film was set. Otherwise, the superiority in quality flows in the exact opposite direction, with Day of the Animals exemplifying everything Cocaine Bear could have been at its best: brutal, bonkers, ballsy, blessed. It is the genuine pop art novelty that Cocaine Bear attempts to reverse-engineer and, thus, is the far superior work. Then again, I was the only member of the audience not laughing at all of Cocaine Bear‘s ironic, postmodern gags & gore, so what do I know?
I remember discussing Aniaraand High Life as sister films when they first went into wide release in 2019: two ice-cold space travel narratives about the doomed prospects of humanity surviving the next few decades of Climate Change decimation. And now we have met those sisters’ goofy little brother in Voyagers: a trashy YA space thriller on a similar subject but without their sense of purpose or coherence. It’s difficult to say whether Voyagers is “about” the same existential concerns as Aniara or High Life. If Voyagers is about anything at all, it might just be a grim warning that teenage hormones are dangerous for space travel. Mostly, it’s just a mockbuster echo of themes that have been tackled in much more thoughtful, substantial works before it (including Equalsand The Lord of the Flies, among the two already mentioned), ensuring that it will only be exciting to a teen audience young enough to not have seen this exact ground tread before. Thankfully, genre filmmaking doesn’t have to be entirely novel to be worthwhile; it just has to be entertaining.
Like in Aniara and High Life, Voyagers follows a doomed, decades-spanning mission to preserve the human race in the farthest reaches of outer space, leaving a decaying Earth behind. It skips over the more complexly philosophical and moralistic conflicts of its smarter sister films so it can quickly get to the good stuff: shirtless teen boys wrestling on a spaceship. Where Aniara and High Life will ask big-concept sci-fi questions about the ethics of forcibly bringing children into a world that is already ending before our eyes, Voyagers instead rapidly ages those children until they’re hormonal powder-kegs, then smashes them together like Barbie dolls in PG-13 friendly make-out sessions. It occasionally pretends to be about the chaotic selfishness of human nature or the dangerous appeal of populist right-wing politics, but it’s heart not really in it. This is not a cinema of ideals or ideas. This is a thirst-trap movie for teens where everyone involved is their age, horny, inexplicably heterosexual, and the boys among them love to wrestle. The only reason it’s even set in outer space is that sometimes a hatch will open so the boys’ shirts will fly right off into the vacuum, revealing their abs for the swooning audience at home.
Voyagers is a bad movie. It’s also a strangely compelling one. There are some truly chaotic editing choices in its early stretch when the starbound teens first discover the joys of living horny & unmedicated, their minds’ eye opened to universe in rapid-fire montage of Ed Woodian stock footage. Not since Lucy has a film so confidently dived headfirst into stock-footage psychedelia on this level of sublime inanity. It’s too bad that editing-room giddiness cools down once the horny teen violence heats up; if they had worked in tandem this could’ve been worthy of Midnight Movie programming for decades into the future. Instead, it’s the kind of so-bad-it’s-decently-entertaining novelty that you shamefully watch on the couch alone, shuttering the windows to hide your shame from the neighbors. I wouldn’t recommend the film so much as I would bashfully admit that I had a fun time watching it – my appreciation crumbling under any scrutiny or pushback against its many, many faults. If you want a Good Movie, watch High Life or Aniara. That’s not what Voyagers is for.
For this lagniappe episode of the podcast, Boomer and Brandon discuss Bong Joon-ho’s English-language debut Snowpiercer, which was selected as Swampflix’s Movie of the Year in our very first week as a website.
Among the big-city dwellers who were lucky enough to see it on the big screen, Claire Denis’s High Life proved to be one of the year’s more divisive films. That work’s stubbornly esoteric allegories about climate change & humanity’s isolation in an uncaring universe could either register as captivating or exhaustively boring depending on its audience’s sensibilities – an effect Denis only amplified by rooting the story in prolonged, systemic cruelty. Even the Swampflix crew was divided on the film’s merits, with Boomer filing a negative review for it the same week CC & I sang its praises on the podcast. In some ways, I wish that same awe-and-vitriol divide had been afforded to this year’s other brutal space travel allegory, Aniara, which shares a lot of thematic ground with High Life when considered in the abstract. Instead, Aniara has been suffering the much worse fate of not being talked about at all. Ever since it premiered at TIFF last year, Aniara has been damned with faint praise as a decent-enough, 3-star sci-fi yarn, which naturally stirs up a lot less critical conversation than the wild, alienating swings of Denis’s film. That’s a shame, since it covers similar thematic territory as the more divisive, attention-grabbing work in a way I think a lot more people would be receptive to. And it’s just sitting right there on Hulu, largely unwatched & undiscussed.
Maybe it’s only genre nerds who’ve spent hundreds of hours watching SyFy Channel reruns of venerated series like Star Trek & Battlestar Galactica who would be greatly excited by Aniara’s melancholy space travel mood. It shares existential climate change themes with High Life, but its story is much more linear & traditionally structured than its arthouse counterpart. At least, it appears that way in the early goings. As the boundaryless void of outer space and the meaningless of time for those drifting across it becomes increasingly apparent, the movie gradually blossoms into its own blissfully bizarre object. No matter how familiar the film’s storytelling structure & spaceship setting may first appear, it’s ultimately a surreal, existential descent into despair that processes the horrors of climate change through a deep-space travel narrative. It features a bisexual female scientist as the lead, dabbles in the psychedelia of futuristic space-cult religions, and argues that maybe bringing new children into a dying world isn’t necessarily the best idea – a tough, but worthwhile topic given our current path to extinction. No film that embodies all those potentially alienating elements should be brushed off as “conventional,” no matter how familiar its tone & setting might feel to sci-fi television storytelling ritual. It’s just that it’s more adventurous & ambitious in its ideas than it is in its formal structure, which could be said about plenty sci-fi classics of the past.
A massive spaceship ferrying a routine transportation haul of human passengers from Earth to Mars is unexpectedly thrown off-course by space junk debris. The captain of the ship informs his horrified passengers that their trip will now take months instead of hours. Those months turn into years as it becomes increasingly unclear whether the ship will ever return home at all. The organic supplies that generate fresh food & oxygen gradually start to rot. Drifting through space with no hope or purpose, the passengers search for higher meaning & easy escapism in their severely limited environment. This mostly entails visits to Mima – a machine that broadcasts holodeck-style images of Nature into the minds of its users. Even before they were stranded on this spaceship, this imagery belonged to a nostalgic past before Earth was wrecked by climate change. Through Mima, it’s now twice removed from its original source, and becomes an addictive tool for mental escapism in what’s essentially a prison ship. Of course, this shipwide abuse of Mima is not sustainable in the long run; the demands of the passengers far outweigh the supply. As the passengers search for other, grander ways to find meaning in their endless drift into the void of deep space (and wrestle with the morality of bringing newborns into such a nihilistic environment), we experience daily life on the titular ship through the eyes of Mima’s operator – who suffers the full spectrum of love, loss, labor, and search for purpose while her years adrift endlessly accumulate.
I’d readily recommend Aniara to any & all sci-fi nerds who’ve ever gotten hooked on a long-running space travel series. I’d especially recommend it to those who were intrigued but frustrated by High Life earlier this year. Personally, both films hit me in about the same way on a thematic level, but I found it easier to buy into the linear, structured drama of Aniara on an emotional one (not least of all due to a stunner of a lead performance from Emelle Jonsson). I appreciated High Life more for its arthouse craft, whereas Aniara left me gutted and terrified for our inevitable near-future doom as a species. Both works are worthy of attention & discussion, even if you end up falling in love with neither.
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