The title had been on the Bagdad marquee for a while, but I hadn’t bothered to search it up. When I finally did some homework, I realized it was in the ballpark of horror sci-fi. That genre interests me, notwithstanding so much slop (nothing new with AI), so I headed out for the matinee. On a hot summer day.
I’ll say up front that I watched it with English subtitles. Not that I need subtitles (English is my first and pretty much only language, unless we say American is something else) but on the first Tuesday of every month or something like that, Bagdad screens the film with captions on. Hearing impaired and/or non-English speakers wanting to learn English, might come to such shows. As it is, I probably picked up on a few lines I might’ve missed, given the accents and everything.
The movie is set in a future England where the virus has ravaged the population and the mainland (Europe and Scandinavia) have quarantined the place. However, a tiny island off the big one, connected only by a tenuous land bridge, has allowed a small English-speaking tribe to keep themselves uninfected. At low tide, the land bridge appears and in principle one of the infected could come storming in their direction. They have defensive fortifications, and bows and arrows. No guns in this universe. No wait, the Swedish have them (we meet up with a Swedish patrol on the mainland, Erik et al).
As I remarked to a friend over iced green tea this morning, having taken the bus, I see movies “guided mediations” in a lot of ways (I used the word "tantric"), and in the hands of a skilled writer and director, the process may serve a given viewer’s mental healing, even if the content is highly traumatic, as it tends to be in this genre (“alas poor Erik” says the doctor at one point).
In this case, I’d say that was the case: the writing was conscious and well informed by the human condition. Theater students will immediately appreciate the Oedipal triangle, a three body problem we always only explore, never really get to the bottom of, except in a love and death sense.
The protagonist is a twelve year old boy and it’s a coming of age story, the kind my late wife treasured, but probably would not have in this case, as not everyone is in a mood for movie therapy. I’m reminded of Poor Thing.
I’m also reminded a new Wes Anderson movie was slated to come out this summer, have I missed it already?
Upon arrival at The Bagdad I queried the ticket seller whether this was part of a series and he replied very intelligibly about there being previous movies in this same universe but I wouldn’t need to see them all in order. I pass that on to those wondering the same thing. And yes, the way the film ended left said universe wide open to another rendering, not unlike the worlds of Mad Max or Planet of the Apes.
