This review contains many spoilers, but I promise you, it won't matter. :)
I didn’t really go into this movie expecting much, but like a moth to a light, I got sucked in. It wasn’t until I left the theater, feeling quite dirty and ashamed, that the point had been made. I had been through a struggle, much like my beloved protagonist. I watched his face closely like all the others, in painful anticipation that one of them would at last spit out the line of dialogue that might finally provide the context I needed to understand what I was seeing. I endured to the bitter end, waiting with anxious unease for the vindication of my desire. I waited for someone to get to the point.
The movie opens with a hook: some lights outside, an earthquake, some dude in his underwear starts turning into a zombie, then… the movie dies for a while. Like another very trying television show I won’t mention, the film timeshifts to 15 hours previously to deliver what I was hoping would turn out to be relevant information. I was optimistic though, so I reached out to my dear screen-friends. They were pretty, after all, and I couldn’t just go and not be empathetic to pretty people. And look! They’re having a pool party, too! That’s pretty awesome, I guess.
But as I sat there in my mental bathing suit, pretending that the banality I was hearing was actually Kerouac, trying REAL hard not to impose – because that would be dreadful rude – I indulged their LA appetites. I went along with the crowd, but only because I really was concerned about my buddy, Jarrod. He’s not quite sure he wants to move to LA yet. Hey, that’s something I can get with, so he mustn’t be all that bad.
Then I found out he knocked up Elaine. That’s kind of personal, so I must be connecting with her, too. Man, this film is awesome! We got a guy who’s maybe got a job in LA doing some computery thing, and he’s going to be a father with someone who maybe doesn’t like LA so much. Ok.
Then, back to the lights.
“Wait!” I said, perhaps a bit too loudly in the theater. “Aren’t we going to get to know the other guys?” (I thought it prudent to whisper this last part, for there may have been some present who had no problem with the story) In fact, I thought, we didn’t really get to know Buddy Jarrod or his old lady all that well either. And now the aliens are going to come and take them away from me? This, I believed at first, was the point of the movie: There are ugly things that will rip away your friends before you fully get to know them. With this in mind, I trudged on.
Some guy got sucked out of the room toward the blinding light and a girl screamed. After that, Buddy Jarrod started to go all zombie again, but thankfully, the light stopped. Not much of an explanation was given for why it happened in this manner, but I assumed there was a reason. I thought maybe Buddy Jarrod was special. Maybe that is why he and the Black Guy have a gun. You must be special if you think a handgun will save you from Ginormous Alienfuckball.
But then an interesting part came: Buddy Jarrod and Black Guy see thousands of people being sucked into the big blue Thing. I found this quite frustrating because the camera didn’t really slow down long enough for me to see anyone’s faces! I kept thinking, “Wait, I might know one of them!” I mean, I have dozens of friends who now live in LA, and I have to know if they’re ok. I guess in retrospect, I only wanted to be able to emphathize with these poor souls, but they seemed more like, well, moths. And who cares when a moth flies into a buglamp, really? The aliens were ripping people away, alright, but they weren’t people from MY life. So actually, not that scary.
But they did start going after Buddy Jarrod and Black Guy shortly after and they almost got ‘em. Here, the aliens acted quite strangely, though. Something about their movements seemed off, but I assumed that I was just reading into it and dismissed it. They were saved, at last, by Pretty Elaine, who opened the door that conveniently locked our heroes on the roof. In doing so, she conveniently looked into the lights of the squid thing and started to conveniently turn zombie. I realized later that the reason for her to do this was so that we, the audience, could have a poet explain to us the awesome power of this strange magnetic light: “It was like being pulled by something. And the light, it was so beautiful.”
Alright, maybe not that poetic, but these are my friends. Maybe they aren’t ahhtists, but perhaps they are more like engineering-types. Yeah, that means they’ll come up with something clever. I’m gonna ride with them and see what they come up with.
Brother Jarrod speaks: “They’re not near the water; we should go to the marina and get a boat and get out of here.” Ok, I’m inspired by his optimism. Because, after all, what would that take? They mentioned it being ten blocks away. That’s probably half an hour to an hour on foot – assuming all other forms of transportation would attract far too much attention. You would probably go at night to avoid being seen, and take the back alleys. But even as easy peasy as that sounds, how do you know those big floating squid monsters are impervious to the air above the water? And where would it take you that is safe? Perhaps you would swim, say to an island? It wouldn’t be fun, but it would save your ass, right? Assuming the aquaphobic alien theory is correct.
So, they pile into their convertibles and high-tail it out of –
Wait, what?
Man, the black guy didn’t have to die! Why did you take cars? And in the broad daylight? And with the top down? This sucks. I liked him.
Oh well. I realized that the Ugly Things Will Rip Your Black Friends Away Theory was probably not the real point of the movie, because this situation was easily avoidable.
Then, enter Angel. I don’t remember his real name, but I recognize him as that smooth-talking, kind-hearted detective from Dexter. He won me over, not just by saving Jarrod and Elaine’s beautiful butts, but by just looking like Angel. I didn’t have to get to know him, because I already KNEW him. It was like going to class for the first time in high school and feeling all alone, and then realizing that someone you know is in the same class with you. And this guy is gonna be with me and Buddy Jarrod until the very last blue light goes out. This'll be awesome! With another shot of adrenaline to my poor, aching heart, I sat up and readied myself with some popcorn for the next episode in the Pretty People saga.
After a while, the popcorn started to taste funny and a queasy feeling started to set in. I wasn’t sure what it was at first, but it went away immediately when the fighter jets arrived. Almost like the movie could see the precursors of the thought, “why is nothing happening?” before I could formulate the thought, the military showed up. I was at first sour to think that the military would be a lame cop-out for a movie with such beautiful people, but their fighter jets looked pretty sweet.
I don’t know how Buddy Jarrod knew which jet had the nuke, but together we watched it fly to the mother ship and drop its payload, and the most miraculous thing happened: Buddy Jarrod and his friends were not affected by the explosion at all. This is the point at which I began to question my assumption of the film’s purpose.
I was beginning to think that maybe Jarrod was getting a lot of freebies, given how little progress he had made towards advancing a goal of any kind. I was starting to see that his friends would begin suffering for his inadequacies and his utter cowardice, and so I formed a new theory: Make friends with the military. It’s not implausible that the purpose of this film would be to raise enlistment levels. And if Monsters come out of the sky to suck your brains out, you’re gonna want some muscle, no?
So I waited for the military to give Soldier Jarrod some orders to make him, uh, useful. I even imagined a downed soldier saying something like, “…must…blow…arc…reactor…” and then handing him some funny-looking but probably expensive device which he would no doubt be able to use because of his computery skills (that is what exposition is for, anyways). But this moment did not come.
Instead, the giant bipedal beasties destroyed every soldier that came on screen. Even the ones on the roof.* As well, the mother ship which was downed by the nuke had somehow, by powers that go just as unexplained as the mothlight powers, reconstructed itself. The military seems quite as useless and incapable here as That Chick That Was With Them At One Point. The only one that ends up DOING anything is Angel, who kills himself trying to do it. Now that’s not very productive. It’s hard to fight off an invasion, what with the whole being dead thing. And he wasn’t really successful, either.
So imagine my frustration. I had come, at last, to the climax of this journey with my pretty new friends; I had laughed and cried, and been through the depths of despair; yet I still didn’t know what the goddam point was! Why am I in this story? AM I in this story? And if I am, does this story have an end? May we get there, please?
But then, I realized those funny movements the aliens were making earlier on the roof, and the movements they made whenever Buddy Jarrod and his better half were on the screen. Watching Jarrod fistfight a squid monster to defend his girl, I knew: They were protected by a Third-Act Forcefield. The Third Act Forcefield is that wonderful device which means the hero will never have to confront the villain until the third act. The villain must always remain JUST weak and slow enough to get us to the end.
As if responding to the other part of my brain that thought of this, one part said, “well great, but that doesn’t explain why we must care.” And the response: “maybe we will be given a reason shortly.” “You lie,” quipped the first. Had I not been drawn to the flickering screen, I might have found more interest in this inner dialogue. This was the climax, you see, and all kinds of flashy lights (albeit not Beautiful Blue) were sucking me in. And before I realized that the hero and his heroine had given up, the movie turned from a comedy into a dark horror movie.
I still don’t know how it happened, but before I knew it, the only people I cared about – who I stopped caring about – were now trapped in some hellish chamber. The heroine wakes up and finds the bodies of those near her being snatched up by giant mechanical arms, their skulls crushed with a chomp, their brains sucked out and spit into a tube of goo, and their bodies tossed into a blue vat. She looks around, hearing the chomping, one by one, of her compatriots, as the arms draw closer to her. She is surrounded by newly created monsters who are receiving new brains as if on an assembly line, and they stomp on by. And at last, Buddy Jarrod is taken from her, and his skull crushed, his body thrown aside. This is the end.
Actually, I thought this is when the film just started getting good. You take the most annoying sorority girl, dim-witted from head to toe, and toss her into this mess, and you bet your ass you’ll get some sympathy from me. But at least in movies like The Human Centipede, you only have to endure about twenty or thirty minutes with the most unsympathetic characters before they start to get real sympathetic real quick.
And so, in the final five minutes of the film, the point seems quite clear to me: Fuck Hollywood.
No, let me clarify that. That sounds cheap, but let me explain. What we have here are people who go to LA and wind up getting sucked into a machine that literally turns them into bio-mechanical robots that go out and do the same thing to everyone they can find. Their only strength seems to be size and a certain knack for wielding arresting amounts of flashy lights. If anyone even thinks of fighting back, they’re gonna find themselves with a squidy up their ass in no time. The worst weapons we can think of cannot bring the beast down, even when we ask the government to step in. They just rebound, and keep on making the lights happen.
In case you haven’t caught the drift, I’m talking about Hollywood itself. Being a filmmaker, I know an awful lot about the machine that is Hollywood, and how no one is going to crash THAT party. If you think you’re just going to go to Hollywood and change the game and start making art, think again. What they care about is the flashy lights, because that is all cinema is to them.
It is for this reason that I felt so dirty leaving the theater after seeing this movie. This film was never attempting to tell a story or generate any kind of emotion from me other than, perhaps, infatuation. Infatuation leads to dollars. But today, they just want our dollars, tomorrow, they may want our minds. Some may say the want this, too. Advertisers would certainly agree that your thoughts have monetary value.
And so, saving the most horrifying elements for the moment after the mothlight has trapped the heroine – this says to me that this film COULD have been an awesome movie. If there was some sort of a “fear of fatherhood” statement to be made here that might introduce some sort of human element, it was lost on me until the final moments. There certainly seems to be in the end, since Beastie Jarrod saves Pretty Elaine from becoming Beastie Elaine.
I don’t think the makers of this film intended any of this, but nevertheless, it’s what I get out of it. I have looked into the light and come out on the other side. I have seen the existential horror that is Hollywood, forever destroying all that is beautiful by directing our attentions towards that which endeavors to consume us.
But at least they are not destroying pretty people.
*At what point does a building collapse under the weight of a monster of the same size? Go back and watch this and tell me what you come up with, because I was sure those buildings were coming down at some point.
