“Warriorrrrrs, come out and play-ee-ay.” –Luther, leader of the Rogues
Thirty-six years after THE WARRIORS stunned audiences with its brutal story of gangs in New York City, ROLLING STONE reassembled key members of the cast for a reunion and a final subway ride to Coney Island, their turf. Get the story here.
Okay, here’s the cheesy sci-fi setup: When a woman named Angelica kills herself, she gives “birth” to a cluster of people who are psychically connected. Eight people around the world suddenly find themselves able to connect emotionally, take over one another’s bodies, and communicate. A nefarious organization sees this sister species of humans as threatening and ruthlessly hunts them down.
What follows is something of a masterpiece.
A creation of the Wachowksi siblings (who gave us THE MATRIX), SENS8, a Netflix original series, is done well on just about every level. The eight characters are richly drawn. They each have a particular ability that is something of a tragic flaw in their own lives but is occasionally extremely help to others as they face their challenges. Even minor throwaway characters who show up in a scene or two are given terrific dialogue and are played to the gritty hilt by good actors.
The theme of the show appears to be life’s a pageant, and we’re the players. The settings, which span nine cities in eight countries on four continents, are always beautiful, often taking us into local festivals and celebrations from the Fourth of July to the Ganesha Chaturthi. There are terrific setpieces such as each of the characters remembering their birth during an orchestra playing in Iceland; the show takes its time exploring the many facets of life. The characters interact with each other in touching ways, showing the beautiful side of human nature even as they each deal with its dark side in their personal lives. While extensive ruminations shared by the characters sometimes drags the show, the tension is always building, and there’s plenty of action. By the end of the first season, the antagonist is well defined, and pretty potent as a villain, and the eight sensates, now fully aware of who and what they are, have formed a strong union.
One of the things I like about the show is its matter-of-fact treatment of gay characters and visuals that might make some people uncomfortable, such as a baby crowning during delivery. The show often seems to say, this is life, deal with it or go watch something else that doesn’t make you feel icky. In particular, I like the way gay characters are treated. They’re not flamboyant stereotypes, nor are they misunderstood but noble souls, they’re just people who happen to be gay, so what.
Another thing that’s impressive about the show is the way it’s shot. The story unravels across cities and continents, and often scenes show characters interacting with each other in multiple locations at once. It’s just incredible–the production company basically travels from city to city, and the actors act out all scenes in that particular city before moving on. When you stop watching and think about it, the amount of planning and editing required boggles the mind. Whether you like the story or not, the overall production is a work of art.
Two thumbs up for Sens8, which I’ll be watching again when season 2 rolls out either later in the year or in 2017. It’s science fiction, but it’s much, much more than that.
Recently watched BEASTS OF NO NATION, a Netflix original film adapted and directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga and based on the book by Uzodinma Iweala. The film stars Idris Elba, one of my favorite actors going back to the first time I saw him in the British vampire series ULTRAVIOLET, and Abraham Attah, who plays Agu, the main character. Elba does an amazing job as the Commandant, but Attah, wow, that kid can act. I loved the film.
The story begins with a family living in a village in an unnamed African country. The village is in a buffer zone protected by the Nigerians during a civil war. Agu is a clever boy making his way, while his father, a local school teacher, works hard to help the refugees pouring into the area.
When one side of the conflict enters the buffer zone, the Nigerians leave the village helpless. Agu’s mother and younger siblings are able to flee to the Capital, but Agu remains in the village with his father, older brother and grandfather. Government troops enter the village and slaughter the inhabitants, believing them rebels, and Agu flees into the jungle.
Agu is captured by a battalion of rebels led by the Commandant, who indoctrinates him and teaches him to fight. He becomes a child soldier, forced to kill.
The film is amazing. The characters come across as flesh and blood people, and their plight is heartbreaking. The politics surrounding the war seem confusing, but that’s because they are, they’re essentially meaningless to Agu. Just groups with acronyms that believe it’s “their turn to eat,” their chance to run things. His reality is limited to eating when he can, fighting when he must, and what the Commandant tells him is reality.
The life of the guerillas is one of hardship, filled with endless marching, fighting, rape and genocide. They wear fantastical uniforms and function something like a cross between a professional army and a cult.
Familiar tropes appear in the film, such as an aid worker driving into a refugee camp surrounded by cheering children looking for a treat, or a UN convoy passing an army of savage-looking guerillas. But the tropes are reversed, they seem strange and out of place, as we’re seeing them from Agu’s point of view.
By the end, we realize the Commandant is using the soldiers, and the rebel government is using the Commandant. The rebels need to commit genocide to win, but the more successful they are, the more they need to please the world community, which means jettisoning the Commandant and potentially leaving the soldiers liable for war crimes.
Gradually, Agu realizes there’s no noble cause, no father figure in the ruthless Commandant, and no justice and revenge–only endless atrocity, cruelty, hardship and political maneuvering by the powerful to line their pockets. After he leaves the war, he realizes his childhood is gone, and doesn’t know if he can even rejoin humanity.
This is a film simple and powerful in its storytelling, brutal in its violence and realism, and moving in its depiction of children used as soldiers in a horrifying civil war.
DARKNET is a hidden gem on Netflix that I recommend you watch right now if you love good horror.
This Canadian production, which unfortunately only created one season of six episodes, is an anthology series depicting interwoven stories of people caught up in the unexpected. In this world, people are drawn to the horrible, and the horrible rewards them, well, horribly. The common thread is Darknet, an underground website in which murderers post videos of themselves committing atrocities.
The filmmakers did an amazing job with their budget, producing stories that never failed to titillate and often surprise. I honestly didn’t expect it to be as fun as it was, and the end of the first season left me wanting more. Hope the filmmakers come back to it at some point.
I couldn’t find a trailer, but here are the scenes from the first episode featuring actress Masa Lizdek. The first sequence reveals the opening of the first episode.
THE KILLER ROBOTS! CRASH AND BURN is an upcoming film about a team of mercenary robots sent on a mission to activate a machine that will bring about a new enlightened age.
You have to check out the trailer below. It looks completely insane. I’ll have to check this one out. Learn more here.
Thanks to the kind folks at QuietEarth.us, I was able to catch a screener of TERMINUS (2015), an apocalyptic film that surprised me.
Things are pretty bleak in America. The country is bogged down fighting in Iran, the government is about to institute a draft, and China and Russia are saber-rattling. Meanwhile, America’s economy is collapsing, and people are out of work and starving.
The film starts with a conscientious and hardworking small-town mechanic, David, who is told the auto shop is closing. His daughter Annabelle comes home from college because he couldn’t afford the tuition. His wife died some time ago due to cancer, leaving him hollowed out. He drinks at a local dive bar, where he defends an Iran veteran, an amputee named Zach, in a fight. David has been ground down by life and is depressed about it, while Zach has been brutalized by war and is angry.
When things couldn’t get any worse for David, he takes a drive that night and crashes his car after seeing the sudden fiery descent of a meteor. Waking up in the wreckage, he staggers to the impact site and encounters a strange artifact. An artifact that seems to be alive. An artifact that heals his wounds and gives him a mission.
Joined by Zach, who is also touched by the artifact, David begins to build a giant steel object in an abandoned workshop. Annabelle wonders if he’s lost his mind. She wants him to focus on how they’re going to survive. But David knows humanity is heading toward a horrifying catastrophe. The TV is on in the background in many scenes, showing devastation and war. In one of the film’s most powerful scenes, Zach protests the draft with fellow veterans, and they get treated like criminals by the police and as traitors by a townsman. No matter how bad things are getting in the country, it stubbornly remains the same.
While all this is happening, agents from the National Science Agency are also tracking the alien life form. Their leader sees it as a way for America to bring the war to an end, imagining a way to harness its regenerative powers to heal wounded soldiers. With that prize in mind, he’ll do anything to get it, even if ultimately it’s all pointless. Their confrontation, the catastrophe, the revelation of the object’s purpose all bring the film to a satisfying conclusion.
Highly realistic and somewhat minimalist, TERMINUS is very low key in its delivery, but the strong characters, the mystery of the object David and Zach are building, and the closing menace of the NSA agents drive the movie, which never flags. David is hardly charismatic, though Jai Koutrae plays the part with quiet and fierce determination. America is in the midst of collapse, but it’s a slow, painful death, more sad than sensational. People still drive cars and have furnished homes, but these things are slowly turning to trash, and people are losing their grip on them as the economy spirals the toilet. This is a story about a small ray of hope set in a country that’s largely lost it.
Good stuff! Check it out if you’re looking for something different in an indie apocalyptic film.