I am not going to review Black Adam.

It’s bad.

OK, I guess I am going to review Black Adam.

It’s bad.

That was the review. I hope you liked it.

I am not going to review Black Adam, but I am going to write about Black Adam, because if I don’t write about Black Adam the sheer confusion that this film has wrought upon my innocent and unsuspecting brain will turn me into one of those people who puts out cheese and peanut butter for the rats in their tenement and, upon earning the trust of said rats, gives them names them Scooter and Mephistopheles and then secretly starts building a Rat Army with Scooter as their second-in-command (sorry, Mephistopheles), eventually training this army to destroy friends and enemies alike.

I do not want to be this person, I do not want a Rat Army (there are better ways to destroy your enemies) so I will write about Black Adam to extricate myself from this fate.

Here is the thing that is bothering me about Black Adam, a movie co-starring Dwayne Johnson and the word Noise as a concept, and bothering me in the same way that the weird lump on the side of my throat that gets a little larger every year bothers me:

Black Adam is an objectively bad movie by essentially any criteria you could possibly hold up against its loud and gristly, perpetually heaving body, but it is also functionally perfect. It achieves what it sets out to achieve – which I will get to in a moment, but I can tell you now has nothing to do with telling a coherent story, or even obeying the rules of causality as they are currently understood – so flawlessly that I cannot technically criticize it because criticizing Black Adam for failing as a work of cinematic narrative would be like criticizing the Monoliths from 2001 for being too perfect a distillation of the inherent unknowability of life. All I can do is stare at the movie, stare and drool, and hopefully the weird sounds that I make create some sort of a recognizable pattern to you, the reader.

I feel like I should be wearing a straightjacket right now.

Let’s start at the beginning, so we can slowly drift away from the guardrails of sanity together, and gaze into the furious colors that mark the end of reason before slowly turning towards one another and, each of us further enraged beyond words at the emptiness in the other’s eyes, begin devouring each other under the auspices of the New Light:

Large movies are produced via an algorithm designed for the sole purpose of maximizing profit by appealing to the largest possible audience. This is not a new observation. This is in fact a very old and stale observation, causing most readers with even a passing interest in Where Movies Come From to roll their eyes and say ‘yes, person desperately trying to justify their comparative literature degree from Wesleyan, popular entertainment strives to be popular. Well done, well observed, your parents are definitely alright with having to take out a second mortgage so you could write that sentence’.

But we cannot stop at this trite observation. Yes, large movies are written by a computer program in order to maximize the appeal of said large movies to a collective consciousness known as ‘the people’.

But that’s the fucking point!

There is, technically, a person being aimed at by this process, even if that person is a collective person, a normal distribution of observable and quantifiable characteristics that are averaged together and result in a sky-shatteringly bland homunculus of neatly averaged personality traits that actually looks forward to something like Iron Man 6 because the homunculus, God save its monstrously-constructed soul, has strong opinions on the first five Iron Man movies.

That is a person, if only technically!

But someone left the Black Adam algorithm on too long, or forgot to carry a one or something, because this film arrives at the Gold Standard of Bland that every large movie aims for and then, like the Spaceball One going to plaid, achieves speeds hitherto thought to be impossible, and in doing so abandons basic causality and even the need for an audience to appeal to.

Black Adam is pure Moment in a way I thought was reserved for monks who have spent their entire lives meditating on top of a fucking mountain, training themselves to subsist entirely on the winds of time and viewing their own demise with the clarity of the next sunrise but experiencing no fear at their sudden evolution of sight because they’ve moved beyond physical concerns. Every frame in this movie, every line of dialogue, every everything, is a random sample of reality taken at regular intervals and presented to the audience like an autistic child showing its latest finger painting to an increasingly concerned parent, if that child was also God and the parents were members of His religion who are really second-guessing not going with Moses when they had the chance, because at least that dude’s God asks you to do practical things like murder your child to prove how much you love Him, or replacing Lilith with Eve because Lilith asked too many fucking questions.

Look at some of the shit in this picture!

‘Paint it Black’ is played ironically and for yucks when Black Adam murders a thousand private military goons, in a scene intended to show us that our ‘hero’ is too angry to truly be a hero at this early stage of the picture. This happens not as a commentary or whatever, but because the algorithm simply chose ‘ironic use of music’ and ‘the actual, literal Holocaust’ as two properties to place into the film without bothering to hold up one of those things against the other and say ‘this is probably a bad idea’. I can’t stress enough that this scene transitions from ‘Black Adam is no hero, look at the devastation he has wrought! Even his enemies do not deserve to die like this!’ to ‘Haha, look at all the murder’ with no actual causal cue of any kind; as in every other scene in the movie this sequence simply changes arbitrarily as the dials on the Machine are twirled wildly by an algorithm gazing back at the rest of us from the end of time and completely uninvested in human emotion as a concept.

Characters are introduced bantering as if this was their third or fourth movie together simply because that is a Thing That Happens in franchise pictures, but, and I cannot stress this enough, these supposed previous movies never fucking happened. Every causal strain from every walk of life has been indiscriminately scooped up by this movie until past events that never actually happened are presented as if they were common knowledge. This is not world-building; it is the failure of reason and the insignificance of time in the eyes of a hateful, ruinous machine.

The movie is essentially one long, increasingly incoherent fight scene, not as a consequence of a writer (ha! a writer!) making a conscious decision to write this film with the kind of lean urgency of a Fury Road or Bullitt but because the algorithm is stuck in a positive feedback loop and can only increase speed as it barrels us towards our own graves. Characters just start fighting in mid-sentence in a sequence of breaks from basic reason that I honestly have never seen in a movie before; it’s as if the algorithm keeps intermittently realizing that a dial labeled STUFF has been allowed to fall to less than its maximum setting and hurriedly cranks that fucker up again, inured to the fact that our fallible human forms are already approaching the resonance frequencies upon which death is inevitable.

This movie cannot hear you scream, so far has it transcended the need for human feedback, and even if it could hear your anguished wails it would simply sample the sound of your demise for a Ke$ha song to be played over the end credits.

This movie represents nothing short of the breakdown of reality. You’re not watching a movie when you watch this movie, you’re watching HAL’s meltdown from 2001; you’re watching an algorithm that has achieved such total scope, and by extension such total indifference, to the data points that it observes and feeds into its own regression analysis that it can no longer delineate between relevant and irrelevant, one side of the quadratic discriminant analysis or the other. You’re watching God realize that He is God and break the fuck down at the revelation, like Wile E. Coyote only falling when he acknowledges that he is, in fact, standing on nothing.

This movie is Dr. Fucking Manhattan, having grown so far beyond our normative human experience that it has no context for things like basic emotion and is instead gazing back at us, the viewer, with blackened, dead eyes, seeing the entirety of our lives from cradle to the fucking grave, from twinkle in the eye to dust in the wind, and having no comment outside of how to best synthesize us into a cinematic paste that can be pressed into a mold to create more shapeless Content.

At least the people that were turned into Soylent Green got to be eaten; this next evolution of film creates the same people-paste and then just kind of rubs its hands in it, mystified by the simplicity of tactile sensation.

This is very concerning!

GAAAAAAHHHHHH

Everything about this movie is a beautiful nightmare, one that I feel I will never be allowed to wake from.

Humans have shuttered vision for a reason.

Our memories fail for a reason.

We’re protecting ourselves against information overload, protecting our brains, which are pattern recognition machines, from being fed too much information, a situation in which those beautiful hunks of grey matter would discern too many connections that aren’t really connections at all and overload itself in the attempt to reconcile those disparate strains.

In regression analysis this is called over-fitting the model.

Black Adam overfits the fucking model, alright.

You’re watching a computer algorithm melt down because its vision is too expansive. It is trying to fit vectors with infinite data points into its model and is breaking down not at the transistor level but the goddamn causal level. We’re talking the Planck length here, people.

I read articles on machine learning and futurism in general because I am lonely and weird and using words like discriminant makes me feel like I have a degree and I never fucking thought that Black Fucking Adam would be the thing to blow past all research papers in the field, all of MIT’s attempts to create dancing robots or whatever, and show us, the fearful people, what grimness the future holds.

It’s like if the Rosetta Stone had been discovered between the heaving, Crisco-slathered pectorals of a man so inadequately contained by his speedo that it’s all you can do to maintain eye-contact with him as you approach that indispensable stele upon which our entire knowledge of the Egyptian written language is based, lest you allow your gaze to traverse downward along the cast-iron fibers of his quadriceps and in taking that trip southward to where the crawdads sing discover why this man’s stage-name is Pipe Bender, and why he started developing back problems long before years of squats took their toll.

It’s like that scene in Spider-Man 3 where Flint Marko is trying to reform his body after first becoming the Sandman but keeps collapsing back into the ether from which careless and accidental science has raised him, except in this case instead of sand it’s whatever acid-nasty rainbird of wet shit and abject confusion that Hollywood executives think qualifies as thoughtful entertainment. This movie is struggling under the weight of its own dumb yearning, and the conflict is intermittently fascinating to watch and actually, literally terrifying, because it represents the end of all things.

This is equality achieved through the most chilling method possible: total indifference to all things, everywhere. There’s a reason why Black Adam frowns at you from inside this movie’s poster. There’s a reason why he frowns in every scene of the movie, at all things, and forever: everything is indistinguishable to the algorithm that powers Black Adam’s ‘decisions’ in the movie, and just like how averaging every color together yields brown when you can see all things at once, forever, you technically see nothing worth focusing on.

The movie sees through us, because it has already assimilated us. Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

The End or Something I Don’t Even Fucking Know

Bad movies shouldn’t have the same effect on the human soul as good movies, because then there would be no point in giving bad movies and good movies different adjectives, because delineating between the characteristics of things is the entire point of adjectives.

This is how badly Black Adam has unseated my calm: I am now forced to remind myself what adjectives are, and how language works. Everything I thought I knew about existence has been turned into cobb salad by this movie and what it represents, turned into cobb salad and thrown lustily upon the floor, and now the movie is staring at me with a smirk on its face and demanding, silently but forcefully, that I eat this careless Floor Salad, and I find myself oddly compelled to acquiesce.

I don’t even like cobb salad.

I’m not even hungry.

We’re standing at the edge of something incredible, and terrifying: a futurity that has achieved the kind of perfect velocity that can only be reached by being completely ignorant of, or at the very least entirely apathetic towards, the actual destination one is heading for, the only concern getting there as loudly and as largely as possible, and moving as much adjacent space as possible along with you, irrespective of that space’s relevance towards or desire to help reach your non-goal. We humans, the traditional consumers of media, have been rendered superfluous by this new process, and are invited only to watch as the vehicles previously intended for us instead sail off, driverless and free, into previously unexplored vistas of dumb, ones hitherto unreachable under the auspices of human conductors.

The algorithm has rendered its own creators irrelevant and has replaced them with the mindless drive for More, and all I can conclude is this:

Black Adam is the first ever post-audience movie, a genre in which you are not actually watching a representation of the human experience given cinematic form but rather are watching a very confused robot consume all of space indiscriminately, and then vomit up the totality of that reality before you, and then start consuming again because it doesn’t know what else to do.

It’s like if farts became self-aware, and also were those worms from Dune, and also were being ridden by the Children of the Corn, and also David Lynch is there, because of course he is.

Black Adam has invented a new form of meditation, one in which you get really angry and really incurious and strain really hard against the eternal limitations of your own weak mind until you’ve essentially weaponized dumb and in doing so have rendered all distances equivalent in both time and space from your own angry, affine seat upon the cosmic toilet and from that new porcelain zero have cracked reality open like a fucking walnut and used that Reality Juice to power your starship directly into a black hole because that black hole was looking at you funny and what’s he know that I don’t, that hole so fucking black and hole-ish, we’ll see who the real joke is when I crash my anger-ship into him and then you do crash your anger-ship into him and in doing so somehow discover an entirely new universe made entirely of tits, which is completely nuts but also perfect.

God save me, I might actually watch this film again just to see if it actually, literally kills me.