-Brandon Ledet
Electric Dragon 80000 V (2001)
sci-fi
Feeders (1996)
-Brandon Ledet
Biosphere (2023)
Mumblecore may be long gone as a moment in time, but the Duplass Brothers are still out there keeping its memory alive. While mumblecore overachievers Greta Gerwig & Noah Baumbach made the highest-grossing film of the year—a feature-length toy commercial, no less—The Duplasses are still making low-key, low-profile indies, still putting together dependably entertaining pictures with limited resources. Even so, their new sci-fi bromance Biosphere feels like a mumblecore throwback stunt in its limited scope, featuring only two actors on a single, sparse, Apple Store futurist set. That scaled-down approach to movie production made more sense when they were making lockdown-era laptop dramas like Language Lessons, but at this point in on-set COVID safety protocols, it’s more of a flex than a necessity. In cynical Gen-X 90s terms, the narrative would’ve been that Barbie was a sign that Gerwig & Baumbach “sold out” and that the Duplasses are somehow nobler artists for continuing to slack around on a condemned & abandoned mumblecore playground. In these post-Poptimism times we’re living in now, though, there’s no such thing as selling out, and all that really matters is that Barbie is one of the best movies of the year, while Biosphere is just the latest example of what its producers have been consistently making for the past couple decades running.
That doesn’t necessarily mean they’re lacking in ambition, though. Biosphere takes admirably big swings on its tiny playground, and it scores major bonus points for taking those swings early, so that it actually has to fully deal with the social discomforts of its premise instead of saving it all for a last-minute twist. Mark Duplass stars opposite Sterling K Brown as childhood best friends . . . and the only two human beings left alive after a nuclear apocalypse. Every detail outside the bond of their friendship gets phonier & phonier the further the story spirals out from there. Duplass unconvincingly stars as the Republican president of the United States and the main instigator of the nuclear shoot-out that ended it all, despite having more of an under-achieving court jester vibe. Brown is slightly more believable as the politically progressive scientist who built the self-contained biodome they’re riding out the Apocalypse in, but the circumstances of when & why he built it get less credible by the minute. That doesn’t matter nearly as much as the question of how two cisgender men are supposed to rebuild society without any outside collaborators for procreation, a question made even more uncomfortable by how their dorm-room college bro relationship is tested by their newfound need to be Everything to each other in a world the size of a living room. Since the movie is most effective when it’s about the specifics of their evolving friendships, it’s probably for the best that there is no world outside their biohome.
I can’t say much more about Biosphere‘s premise without completely spoiling it, which I guess means that you should watch it with your best bro, so you have someone to talk it out with. It’s thematically provocative in its discussions of the physiology & power dynamics of gender, poking specifically at the most sensitively guarded area of the topic: straight male companionship. What does it say about the Duplasses’ filmmaking ambitions that Mark already starred in a movie about those exact bromantic sensitivities way back in 2009? I’m not sure, but I do know that Humpday was received as a substantial entry in the mumblecore canon, while Biosphere feels untethered from anything especially urgent or substantial at all. Even within the subgenre of movies contained in biospheres, it’s nowhere near as provocative as the eco-terror bomb-thrower Silent Running nor as memorably goofy & inane as the stoner bro comedy Biodome. It’s just a Duplass Brothers movie that happens to have a sci-fi theme – the kind of low-key, oddly phony drama that makes you wonder why they didn’t just stage an off-Broadway play instead of making a movie. I appreciate its ambition to challenge its audience in its thematic ideas, while I also question when The Duplasses are going to start challenging themselves with cinematic ones.
-Brandon Ledet
Poor Things (2023)
“We are a fucked species; know it.”
“We are all cruel beasts – born that way, die that way.”
“Polite society is fucking boring.”
“Polite society will destroy you.”
“All sexuality is basically immoral.”
Poor Things is the kind of movie about the total scope of life as a human being that allows characters to voice those kinds of abstract philosophical statements, often with immediate dismissive pushback from the poor souls hearing them. In that way, it’s the culmination of everything provoc-auteur Yorgos Lanthimos has been working towards since early antisocial provocations like Dogtooth & Alps. He’s always had a coldly detached fascination with basic human behavior & relationships, but he has yet to dissect & catalog them all in a single text the way he does here. Every new Lanthimos movie feels like it’s poking at some assumed social norm as if it were a corpse he found in the woods. Poor Things finds that naive interrogation at its most scientifically thorough & perversely fun, to the point where he articulates the entire human experience through repurposed dead flesh. In doing so, he’s clearly made The Movie of the Year, and so far the movie of his career.
Emma Stone stars as the repurposed corpse in question: a suicide victim who has been reborn as a Frankenstein-style brain transplant experiment in a mad scientist’s Turn-of-the-Century laboratory. Her monstrous “Daddy God” creator—played with pitiable Elephant Man anguish by Willem Dafoe—initially keeps his experiment on a short leash, confining her entire life to his grotesque but lavish home. She eventually breaks free, though, as all Frankenstein monsters do, and ventures into the world as an adult-bodied woman with the mind of a rapidly developing child. Her resulting interrogation of the world outside her home is intensely violent, as anyone who can picture an adult-sized toddler throwing a temper tantrum would expect. It’s also intensely sexual, as she can find no joy more immediately self-fulfilling than orgasmic bliss but lacks basic understanding of that joy’s socially appropriate boundaries: assumed monogamy, acceptable dinner conversation, the stigma of sex work, when & where it’s permissible to masturbate, etc. If she is meant to represent humanity at its most basic & untouched by learned social restrictions, she represents us as insatiably horny, violent beasts who have to consciously strive to learn empathy for each other because it is not innate in our souls. It’s a hilarious, uncomfortably accurate assessment of the species.
If there’s any one particular social norm that Lanthimos naively interrogates here, it’s a gendered one. Much of the reanimated monster’s exploration of Life is limited by the men who wish to control her. First, her Daddy God confines her as a domestic prisoner, the same way all fathers of young women fear their freedom as autonomous adults. Once she’s loose, a small succession of selfish bachelors aim to trap her again in the domestic prison of marriage: Ramy Youssef as an ineffectual Nice Guy, Mark Ruffalo as a dastardly fuckboy fop, and Christopher Abbott as a sociopathic abuser. All the men in the monster’s life seek to control her in ways that stifle her self-development. It’s a movie about male possessiveness just as much as it’s about the absurdities of Life & societal decorum in that way, and the heroic triumph at the center is mostly in watching the creature fuck & read her way out of her patriarchal bonds to become her own person. At times, that sentiment is expressed through philosophical assessment of what it means to live as an ethical person in modern society. More often, it’s a crass celebration of women being annoying & gross in public despite the men around them demanding they calm it down. It’s oddly uplifting in either case.
Yorgos Lanthimos’s films have become more recognizably comedic since he broke through to a wider audience with The Lobster, and they’re all the better for it. There’s a sense of playful collaboration here where the director allows each contributor freedom to run wild: Stone & Ruffalo in their sketch comedy acting choices, cinematographer Robbie Ryan in his fish-eye lens fantasia, screenwriter Tony McNamara in his violent perversions of vintage humorist quips. It’s telling that the only work that’s directly alluded to onscreen (besides, arguably, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and its James Whale mutations) is Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, another prankishly prurient comedy of manners. Lanthimos has always morbidly poked at social norms & decorum with this same curious outsider’s perspective, but never before while taking so much obvious glee in the act, nor on this wide of a scope. I rarely have this much fun thinking about how we’re “a fucked species” of “cruel beasts,” and how our rules of appropriate social interaction are so, so very “fucking boring.”
-Brandon Ledet
The Marvels (2023)
It’s been a long time since one of these movies was good, hasn’t it? It’s been four and a half years since Endgame, and since then even I, longtime superhero movie proponent-turned-apathetic-turned-detractor, have grown tired of talking about how this franchise had degenerated into serviceable if dreary (Guardians 3), effective if propagandistically nostalgia-driven (No Way Home), and even ugly and miserable (The Eternals, which I/we never even bothered to review, and Quantumania). I couldn’t quite bring myself to finish Shang-Chi, never bothered with Love and Thunder, and only watched the Doctor Strange sequel because I will watch anything Sam Raimi does, but again, there’s no hyperlink for that because no one around these parts could be arsed to write one. Not even me! But sometimes you get an invitation that you can’t (or don’t want to) reject, and you find yourself drinking a milkshake and looking at Brie Larson’s face and really enjoying yourself.
The big joke going around about this one is that, in order to understand it, you’ll have had to done a ton of homework, including not only watching all of the films but also the TV series Ms. Marvel and WandaVision (which, full disclosure, I did see), and perhaps the universally reviled Secret Invasion, which was so far from my radar that I initially typed out Secret Wars and then had to correct myself after a quick Google search. One of the great things about the Alamo Drafthouse is that, for these movies, they often edit together a quick homemade “previously on” segment to introduce the film for audience members who may not be trying to pass the MCU SATs (the voiceover of which is slowly sounding more and more acerbic, which I cannot object to). Even without that, however, I think this one is actually an easy entry point, with the only truly required “reading” is Captain Marvel, and I think it’s fair to say that if you care about this movie at all, you’re probably caught up. The character introductions to one another in this one serve as functional introductions for the audience as well, and they handle the “who’s who” as deftly as is possible for dialogue that is expository, both in and outside of the text.
Brie Larson returns as Carol “Captain Marvel” Danvers, who is shown to be working for Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) in checking out various disruptions that he’s now detecting from his satellite base. Also on said station—or technically just outside, as we first see her performing EVA—is Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris), who picked up some various light-based powers like being able to phase through matter and shoot light blasts in WandaVision. She and Carol have a past, specifically that “Aunt Carol” was like her second mother before disappearing in the 1990s with the (unfulfilled) promise to return; further, she was one of the people who disappeared during “the Blip,” and returned to learn that she was just a few months too late to be able to say goodbye to her mother before she succumbed to cancer. Meanwhile, planetside in Jersey City, teenaged Kamala Khan (Iman Vellani), Captain Marvel superfan who has styled her own superhero identity of “Ms. Marvel” after Carol’s, is drawing her fanfic of getting to team up with her hero, when she suddenly disappears. It seems that elsewhere, a woman named Dar-Benn (Zawe Ashton) from the resource-depleted planet of Hala has discovered the location of a seemingly magical gauntlet/bangle, which she plans to use to restore her world to its prior glory. Because of wibbly-wobbly spacey-wacey quantumbabble, this leads to Kamala, Carol, and Monica becoming “entangled,” such that any time two of them use their powers, they physically exchange places.
This fairly absurd premise introduces a freshness and a spontaneity to the proceedings that makes it fun and frenetic in a way that this franchise hasn’t really managed to elicit in a while. When the MCU goes cosmic, that’s generally where it has the most room to play around and be weird and fun, as evidenced by the first two Guardians and Rangarok, and this one takes a page from the playbooks of those movies to visit some novel backdrops for interesting action sequences in vibrant color—and it’s been a while since you could say that about one of these. This includes a sequence of hand-drawn animation of Kamala’s comics that feature her fighting alongside Captain Marvel, complete with onomatopoeic “booms,” as well as an extended scene in a palace on a world where the language is song, but the highlight for me comes at the climax. This is the kind of movie where there aren’t enough undamaged escape pods to flee a deteriorating space station, but there are a few dozen kitten-like aliens with secretly tentacled mouths and which have previously been demonstrated to be capable of swallowing people whole and spitting them back out again. As a last ditch effort, these “cats” are let loose to devour the remaining 150 people on board as they run in terror before adorable kittens, so that the cats can be put in the last escape pod and then vomit everyone up later once they’ve escaped. All of this literal cat herding is set to “Memory” from Webber’s Cats. It’s the kind of fun that these movies should be having/inducing, if they must continue to be made.
What really makes the movie work, however, is the chemistry between its cast members. The three women, whom Kamala dubs “The Marvels” even though Monica claims no such moniker (in the movies, at least), play well against each other. Carol and Monica’s estrangement makes for easy relationship shorthand, but that’s not a criticism, since this film could (as its detractors have assumed) be too lore-dense for its own good. Kamala’s hero worship of Carol makes her fulfillment of that fantasy a lot of fun to watch, and although it would be very easy for a different performer to fail to stay on this side of the line between endearing and overbearing, Vellani is doing stellar work as the younger Marvel; she’s not even close to going out of bounds. Her energy is infectious, and her realistic reactions to things that the other characters (and we who have been watching these movies for fifteen years) have become jaded to make it all feel fresh and new again.
I’m sure there is good faith criticism of this movie that doesn’t focus solely on the product so much as its perceived “wokeness” or its box office performance. This is a show that follows the maxim of MST3K: “repeat to yourself it’s just a show” (and at this point, this is more of a fun, not-too-serious episode of a long-runner show than it is a movie unto itself; it’s time we all stopped kidding ourselves about that), “and you should really just relax.” For a lot of extremely online people who have a hyperfixation on this franchise and experience no joy outside of taking it away from others, I’m sure they’ll also find no end of faults to complain about here. I can already sense them opening their microblogging platforms; I can already hear the deep inhale as they prepare to unleash an incogent rant about how Disney is trying to ram something down their throats (it’s always about throats with those guys). I’m not here to carry water for that monopoly, I assure you, and the company’s failure to invite the director to the premiere is outrageous. If anything, though, Thanksgiving season is a time when a lot of people end up cooped up with their families for extended periods of time, and sometimes the best way to get everyone to shut up for a while is to let the local Regal play babysitter for a while. There are worse things to do.
-Mark “Boomer” Redmond
Lagniappe Podcast: Star Trek – First Contact (1996)
For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss the Next Gen Star Trek time travel episode First Contact (1996).
00:00 Welcome
06:54 Anatomy of a Fall (2023)
16:46 L’immensità (2023)
19:17 Priscilla (2023)
23:11 Star Trek – First Contact (1996)
You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.
-The Lagniappe Podcast Crew
Fire in the Sky (1993)
After checking out recent release No One Will Save You, my appetite for extraterrestrial abduction content was whet, and the streaming service formerly known as HBOMax was there with a cleanup hitter in the form of 1993’s Fire in the Sky. The movie is based upon a book written by an Arizona logger named Travis Walton that purports to recount his encounter with aliens in 1975. Walton’s is one of the more noteworthy cases in that his alleged abduction was witnessed by five other men who were with him when they all saw the same strange phenomena, the standard light/energy/noise “emanations” that are common for UFO witnesses. Walton himself remained missing despite a few search parties before reemerging from the wilderness some five days later — starved, dehydrated, and seemingly traumatized to near-catatonia.
The film plays with committing to the reality of Walton’s claims from the outset and does so rather cleverly, as it opens with the other five men arriving at the local watering hole disheveled and rattled and talking amongst themselves about the importance of getting their stories straight and other pieces of dialogue that maintain ambiguity about their relative guilt/innocence. From there, an out-of-town lawman named Watters (James Garner) arrives at the scene to assist in what’s being treated as a missing persons case. The foreman of the crew, Mike Rogers (Robert Patrick), recounts the events of the day, up to and including his future brother-in-law Travis (D. B. Sweeney) getting out of the truck to investigate an inexplicable light show and being struck by something invisible. The other loggers in the truck insist on fleeing whatever is out there, but Mike eventually insists that they go back for Travis; when they return to the spot where he collapsed, there’s no sign of him.
For most of Act II, the film plays out more like a small town drama about people’s lives collapsing under the collective weight of the presumption of guilt heaped upon them by their community, with some investigative procedural elements thrown in for good measure. Watters believes that Travis was killed by one of the other loggers, Dallis (Craig Sheffer), a “drifter” who didn’t get along with Travis, and that the rest of the crew were helping to cover it up. Desperate to prove his innocence, Mike commits himself and his crew to polygraph tests, all of which seem to indicate that the men are telling the truth with the possible exception of Dallis, whose test is inconclusive. Suddenly,Travis reappears, and from this point, the film no longer plays coy with whether or not the abduction story is true within the film. Even as Watters adjusts his hypothesis to include the men pulling a publicity stunt that wasted time and resources, Travis is tormented by the remembrance of the events of his abduction as they slowly resurface.
This is one of those movies that got significant airplay on Sci-Fi Channel in my youth, although I had never actually seen it; the commercials advertising its upcoming airings always included the iconic image of Travis Walton cling-wrapped to an alien operating table, which frankly scared the shit out of me. It was one of those childhood terrors that remained tantalizingly unresolved until this first viewing, and as such I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. Unfortunately, the opening credits spoil some of the ambiguity pretty early on, given that there’s a huge wall of text declaring that the film is “Based on the book The Walton Experience by Travis Walton,” dulling the impact of the question of whether Walton was murdered by his co-workers. Still, a lot of pathos is wrung out of the disappearance, and that’s something that you don’t normally see in this kind of media, so it was a pleasant surprise. If alien abductions are your personal horror preference, this one might not exactly live up to every expectation, given that there’s less of that in the finished product than what trailers and clips might imply, but what is present is harrowing and memorable. Give it a shot.
-Mark “Boomer” Redmond
No One Will Save You (2023)
Brynn Adams is alone. She doesn’t seem to be all that troubled by it, at least most of the time. She wiles away the hours in the sumptuous country home that she occupies by herself like a woman unstuck in time: she learns decades-old dance steps from numbered diagrams while listening to Ruby Murray’s “Knock On Any Door” from 1956; she designs and creates her own dresses; she’s even recreated the entire town of Mill River in miniature in her living room. When she ventures into the real town, she ducks to avoid certain people, and when she attempts to interact with others, all she gets in return are sneers and frigid shoulders. The closest thing she seems to have to human contact is a mailman who intentionally damages her packages. Brynn’s been alone for a long time, but she’s about to have … visitors.
Kaitlyn Dever, who I really liked in last year’s Rosaline, both stars in and executive produces for No One Will Save You, the sophomore directorial effort from Brian Duffield, who is perhaps best known around these parts for writing The Babysitter. I first became aware of the movie after a screenshot of Stephen King calling the film “Brilliant, daring, involving, [and] scary” as well as “Truly unique,” and I went into it blind, which allowed for me to be pleasantly surprised not only by all of the film’s tiny reveals but also its big one; namely, No One is almost entirely dialogue free. Dever is the only performer who ever gets to speak, and it’s telling that her single impactful line is spoken to no one, or at least to no one who can hear her. That’s not to say that she’s not well developed; in fact, I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if this becomes one of those films that achieves cult status through its use as a teaching tool via its masterful adherence to the timeless axion of “Show, don’t tell.” Everything important about Brynn is captured by the filmic eye: the regretful letters she composes to her childhood best friend Maud, her awkward attempts to practice waving and greeting others, her abject terror at the prospect of interacting with a middle-aged couple we later learn are Maud’s parents. The story moves clearly and cleanly without the need for dialogue, as the film cuts seamlessly and smartly between Brynn encountering a situation and her resolution of the same. For instance, in one simple sequence, we watch as Brynn rides her bike into town for help after being unable to start her car, experiencing an extremely unpleasant but nonetheless wordless encounter with Maud’s mother and father (the latter of whom is the chief of police) that reminds her that—as the title tells us—no one will help her, and then immediately cuts to her at a bus station, ticket in hand. There’s no spoon-feeding and there’s no need for it, either.
We eventually learn what happened between Brynn and Maud that left Brynn a pariah in Mill River, and it’s devastating. Outside of the flashbacks that fill this in, however, the film takes place over a brief time frame of only three days and two nights. The first of these nights sees Brynn (sort of) fend off a home invader, who just so happens to be an extraterrestrial. When she finds herself unable to gather assistance or successfully escape town the following day, she prepares to defend herself for a second night, only for the film to perform a little sleight of hand with its genre, transitioning from the home-invasion-with-an-outer-space-twist narrative to a more introspective form of psychological horror, as the aliens attempt to assimilate Brynn into a pod-people collective. Their means to do so involve tempting her to give up her mind and body through visions of a reality where she is no longer bound by the tragedy of her past and no longer missing the things which have been lost to her. When that doesn’t work, the snare she’s in just gets tighter.
This movie lives and/or dies on Kaitlyn Dever’s performance, and it’s a testament to her ability that it soars. The camerawork here is likewise deft in the way that the language of pans and zooms keeps us in Brynn’s headspace so effectively; the touch is so lightweight as to make its capture of all the moving parts appear almost effortless. The visual effects work is also top notch; the aliens feel appropriately otherworldly even if the CGI seams are unavoidable, while the film wisely chooses clever takes on familiar ways of visualizing standard abduction phenomena, borrowing heavily from The X-Files and its use of blinding beams of white light (the abductions of Duane Barry in the second season and Max Fenig in season four come to mind), although it also includes occasional pervasive red lighting that calls to mind the opening of Fire in the Sky. The film moves in novel and exciting ways, and it’s well worth checking out.
-Mark “Boomer” Redmond
Freejack (1992)
Hoo boy is this one a lot of fun, and it’s free, Jack! (Sorry.) Crackerjack racecar star Alex Furlong (Emilio Estevez) is looking forward to marrying sweetheart Julie Redlund (Rene Russo) once he gets all of his ducks in a row. Unfortunately, this crisp November 1991 day is the day that he crashes his racer in a deadly fireball, leaving behind a heartbroken Julie. Meanwhile, in the distant future of 2009, Vacendak (Mick Jagger) and his crew of “bonejackers” cruise through a hellish dystopia in order to line up their machinery with Furlong’s past accident and teleport (or “freejack”) him into the future. See, scientists have figured out how to transfer consciousness from one body to another, gifting immortality to (the wealthiest 1% of) humankind; however, since everyone in 2009 has lived with such intense and prolonged pollution and suffering, the rich don’t want their bodies. Instead, people like Vacendak are bounty hunters for people who can be plucked out of the stream of time like a fish without causing any time-snarling shenanigans — that is, moments before their death and only if they wouldn’t leave identifiable remains anyway. When the bonejacker caravan is knocked out of commission, Furlong escapes.
After making his way home and finding that Julie no longer lives there, Furlong stumbles into a church, where an atypical nun (Amanda Plummer) fills in the background of the new world order. She explains the concept of freejacking, the immortality machine, and why it looks so much like Class of 1999 outside. She is unable to find Julie online but is able to connect Furlong with his old manager Brad (David Johansen of New York Dolls), who promises to get him in contact with Julie. Elsewhere, Julie has done rather well for herself, rising to an executive position at a major corporation headed by Ian McCandless (Anthony Hopkins), where she works alongside the CEO’s right-hand man Michelette (Jonathan Banks). She, along with the other elites, lives in one of a series of skyscrapers in a gated part of the city, far from the hoarse cries of any yearning masses longing to be free. Furlong must convince her that he is who he says he is—not some guy who freejacked her lost love—and avoid capture by Vacendak, Michelette, or any other interested party for 36 hours, at which point the mind of the mysterious rich person who wants to take over his body will be too degraded to be redownloaded.
This is exactly the kind of movie that the camp stamp was made for. Normally, a low-brow, high-concept movie like this requires the invention of some kind of fantastical breakthrough or discovery, but this film requires two miraculous feats of science (mind transference and time trafficking), which should push the envelope to the point of being too unbelievable. And, yeah, it is, but once you see the series of casual leather outfits that Jagger gets to parade around in, the minitanks that the bonejackers drive (one of them is indigo with pink detailing and the name Sheila emblazoned in neon green script), the hideously eighties stone offices, and what the creators believed passenger cars would look like in 2009, then it’s impossible not to just give in and have a good time. In a way, Freejack presages companion Rip-Van-Winkle-but-as-a-nineties-action-flick film Demolition Man, but while that film is, in many ways, a conservative’s worst nightmare about a future ruled by political correctness, Freejack is movie that recognizes that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer and that corporate interests and wealth hoarders’ desperation to prolong their lives are the things that will/do dominate the 21st century. Both films, however, spend a lot of time exploring the fish-out-of-temporal-water nature of the protagonist after just a couple of decades while also demonstrating technological and social leaps that are completely impossible during such a short time frame. And, because Furlong is a racer, Freejack is also chock full of chase scenes and races against time, which create the illusion of plot progression even when it spins its wheels from time to time.
If anything, this is the result of being overstuffed. Production problems on the film were rife (YouTube channel GoodBadFlicks released a pretty extensive overview a few months ago), and although it doesn’t seem to have had much of a cultural impact, it’s strange that this one hasn’t had its day in the limelight as a wrongly maligned, misunderstood classic. This was released just at the start of Estevez’s star renaissance, as The Mighty Ducks released later that year, and came right on the heels of Hopkins’s career-defining role in Silence of the Lambs. A lot of major performers meet at this crossroads, but it’s been all but forgotten in the wake of their other successes, but in spite of all of the studio interference, I think that there’s actually a pretty great nineties action flick here. This would be the decade that, in the wake of the eighties sci-fi action hat trick of Terminator, Predator, and Aliens, speculative fiction would become a dominating factor in action film before reaching its apotheosis in 1999 with The Matrix; Freejack, with its “spiritual switchboard” technology and the hijacking of people’s bodies, is a part of that cyberpunk evolution. It’s somehow more than the sum of its parts; there’s a sequence near the end where Furlong confronts the person responsible for his freejacking in a spherical room that projects a series of holograms that represent the mind of the stored villain. Images fade in and out, and although I think it probably is not the exact effect that the filmmakers were trying to convey and a modern audience may reject them as “bad FX,” but I find their dreamlike gaussiness and the way that things appear and reappear to be a very effective visualization of the ever-changing thoughts and mental landscape of the antagonist. There’s so much attention to detail in so many places that are a true testament to Geoff Murphy’s work that, in spite of the production hell, this movie not only is more than functional but is in fact exceptional. It’s not perfect, but it is a lot of fun. And hey — it’s available for free right now on YouTube (with commercials). Why not?
-Mark “Boomer” Redmond
Aporia (2023)
“Aporia” refers to a declaration of one’s doubt in something, often a statement which does not actually reflect the speaker’s actual belief. Within the Socratic method, it was the state in which Socrates left his verbal sparring partners after he picked apart their definitions of a concept through a series of questions that ultimately revealed his opponent’s lack of solid philosophical standing. More recently, it’s become largely synonymous with the word “paradox,” which was likely the reason that the word was chosen as this film’s title; however, if one perceives the word as reference to a statement that does not match the belief of the speaker, it actually makes for a fairly decent joke about this film’s overall lack of self-reflection.
Sophie (Judy Greer) is deep in mourning over the loss of her physicist husband Mal (Edi Gathegi) eight months ago. Their soon-to-be-twelve daughter Riley, who shared her father’s love of rocketry and astronomy, is likewise adrift, withdrawing from her mother, skipping school, and preparing to sell the model rockets she and her father built together. After Sophie is forced to call on Mal’s friend Jabir (Peyman Moaadi) to help her out by collecting Riley from school when she is suspended, Jabir lets her in on a quantum physics project that he and Mal were tinkering around with before the latter’s death. It’s a time machine, essentially, although not of the normal transportation variety; instead, it’s capable of sending a single particle back in time to a certain place, meaning that it’s functionally a gun that kills someone in the past. Jabir originally started working on the idea because he could never get over the massacre of his family, the tragedy which drove him to immigrate to the U.S. in the first place; affecting the past that far back will require a great deal of power, but a shorter time frame might work. It’s untested, but he can no longer sit on the sidelines of Sophie’s life and watch her drown in her grief without offering her the opportunity to “rescue” Mal by “taking out” the drunk driver who killed him before the accident ever occurred.
Mal’s inevitable return to life needs to happen ten minutes sooner (with less hemming and hawing about the moral implications and fewer, denser scenes of Riley acting out); this would also open up some room in Act II for more interesting discussion about the consequences of Sophie and Jabir’s action. There’s something very interesting that happens in here, as those who are protected from the memory ripple effect slowly become more disconnected from the world because they remember it differently. It would have been fun to explore with more butterflies getting squashed, so to speak, but since there are just a few changes to the timeline, we go from Timeline B, where the changes are limited to work schedules and furniture arrangements, to Timelines C (with no apparent ripple effects that our characters notice) and then D, where the changes are so extreme that Mal and Sophie’s lives are barely recognizable.
The removal of Mal’s killer leaves his wife Kara (Whitney Morgan Cox) a single mother in dire financial straits, exacerbated by her daughter Aggie’s multiple sclerosis diagnosis and the medical costs thereof. Feeling responsible for the other woman’s situation and seeing her own grief reflected in Kara, Sophie invites her to dinner, and Aggie & Riley strike up a friendship after some initial friction. When Aggie’s symptoms worsen and she ends up in the hospital, Mal, Sophie, and Jabir debate whether or not to kill a man who, a decade prior, embezzled Kara’s money from her successful bakery, leaving her unable to afford to both keep her house and care for Aggie. Although the trio is reasonably convinced that the death of “the Bernie Madoff of Arizona” just a few months earlier than his natural death will have no effect on their life situations, they emerge from the room where they shot the man through time only to discover that they are impostors in their own lives: unknown to old friends, greeted with warmth by unknown faces, and, for Sophie and Mal, faced with a child who is a stranger to them.
There’s a lot of promise here that simply isn’t lived up to. If nothing else, this is a showcase for Judy Greer to do some more dramatic work, and she sells it. The writing here is often good, although its highlights are interspersed with a lot of dialogue that is fairly workmanlike. I won’t bother getting into the minutia about fictional temporal mechanics either as that’s a hobby for pedants and bores, but I will say that anyone who’s ever seen a movie with time travel (or time murder, as is the case here) in it knows that Jabir can’t go back to his youth and save his family from being killed. If he does, he never comes to America, he never builds the time rifle, so he never goes back in time, bake at 350° F for 22 minutes and you’ve got a paradox, which in this narrative means a reset. Of course, this also means that anyone who’s ever seen one of these knows that this will come into play once our heroes decide they’ve mucked up the timeline badly enough that they have no choice but to nuke the whole thing and hope that whatever versions of themselves exist in the new timeline land on their feet. It’s to the film’s credit that it ultimately embraces ambiguity in its ending, but it’s not enough for me to give this one a recommendation. It’s a shame, too; there are so many potentially potent building blocks in play that are undercut by the film’s handheld camerawork, which is a common choice for these cheapy sci-fi time travel flicks, but one which is at odds with the attempts at nuanced storytelling, discussions of ethics, and Greer leaving it all out on the field. The film is simply working against itself in too many places to come together into a cohesive whole, and in the end, it seems to lack the very conviction that one definition of “aporia” implies.
-Mark “Boomer” Redmond
Swampflix 