This is kind of a review, but it’s also an overview, and a re-view, and a speculative view, and a pontification on trends I’m probably not qualified to write about. It’s a lot of things. I guess the movie itself is a vector by which to investigate interesting ideas? A familiar terminal from which we can safely jut off down some historical or analytical vein and perform the necessary work to better understand where stories come from and how they change over time while simultaneously finding reassurance in the knowledge that we’ll be able to return home whenever we want to, to find respite in the familiar, to pull our heads out of the disorienting and vaporous world of details that can be so onerous in the collective and reset ourselves with the restoring air only ever found back at the higher, clearer, more equanimous plateaus? Sure. Those were words. John McClane drops an SUV on someone in this movie. That’s what you came here for. That’s what I came here for. I’ll mention the SUV thing again, because it rules.

Die Hard 4 Review

Die Hard 4 is the story of an illiterate potato being thrown through a series of metrosexual windows by someone who hates people but also craves their approval. Conflict arises when some of the windows prove to be more resilient to unprompted potato-death than others for any number of reasons – tempered glass, thicker material, the window knows karate, etc. There is only ever one possible solution when these problems arise and that is to throw the potato harder and with even more pent-up sexual frustration. This works every time, and could never not work, because failure of the potato-rage paradigm under any circumstance would obliterate the logic, the very reality, on which this film is constructed, the result being something on par with Wile E. Coyote ever catching the Road Runner, or SpongeBob finally just telling everyone in Bikini Bottom to fuck off and then doing a whole bunch of blow with Gary. Die Hard 4 is a temple built in reverence of its own incuriousness, an endeavor whose final product is so startlingly on-brand that they forgot to give it doors or windows, and the entire thing is made of beef.

Actually, we need a decent foundation from which to start if we’re going to use DH4 as a jumping-off point to talk about some stuff, so while everything written above is completely accurate and should be provided without hesitation as a handy primer to anyone considering viewing this movie for the first time, it should also be noted that Die Hard 4 is actually a good film. Moreover, it is a fascinating and historically important one. It is in many ways a kind of beautifully idiotic peroration of the epoch that birthed it, like the Saint Crispin’s Day Speech if King Henry V had been kicked in the head by a horse before giving it, was drunk off his ass anyway, but also truly believed every word he said, even if most of them came out slurred and incomprehensible. That’s the real magic of the movie: its virtuosity in a paleo-to-the-point-of-being-feral sub-language of the larger cinematic discourse, honed by decades of entries so well-informed by one another as each one stripped away more superfluous language, amalgamated more parts into wordlessly-efficient alloys, in an almost caveman-scholarly competition that I’m not sure any of them ever actually realized they were in. We’re talking, like, West-African talking drums levels of efficiency, here, and pared down to that breathless exchange mostly by incidental, moronic competitive instinct. And to hear the movie traffic so fluidly in this timbre and tone while the New Language of action movies, one that somehow would manage to be considered significantly smarter while also being unquestionably louder, twinkled incipient and ambitious on the horizon further embellishes this dynamic with even more accoutrements to consider. It’s so exciting! Let’s do another section name.

The Cinematic Language of Pretending to be so Tough That You Can Bench a Fucking Helicopter  

So what do I mean about this fascinating, sublimated sub-language? Let me try to give the formless thing form, hoist it for a moment from its place down there greasing the wheels of the story and make its time-honed magic explicit, and let me do so with a simple question: what’s the name of that woman in Murdoch’s inner circle? The one in the FBI’s Cyber Security Division? That vaguely Asian lady who is always around whenever the Pointy-Headed Useless People are reminding us of their inability to solve problems while McClane is out ending terrorism and probably also curing scoliosis, both feats somehow involving headbutting a boiled ham, or driving an ice-cream truck full of dynamite into a building full of men who all agree that the crying is a viable form of expression? Trick question, motherfucker! Forget that lady’s name; there isn’t even a character named Murdoch in this movie; the head dude at the Cyber Security Division is named Bowman! But you see, that’s the point. That’s the language made explicit. You knew exactly who I was talking about before I even started offering more specific details about the lady in question, and more importantly you knew exactly where this woman and Burdoch/Murbman stood in the film – literally and figuratively – relative to McClane (Burdochmurb is just the grizzled police chief character – “Dammit, McClane, you’re a loose cannon but you get results!” – being given a slightly different job title, but functioning in the exact same capacity). In fact, you probably couldn’t even conceive of their personalities outside of any sentence that begins with “Well, when McClane…” followed by something about him, not them. I know I can’t! Their entire existence is defined in terms of where they stand relative to McClane. It’s nuts! The language of cinema – or in this case, the sub-language of the ego-driven action movie – reached such a level of butter-smooth sublimity by this point in cinema history that, like when SpongeBob goes into the future and finds everything is made of chrome, the invisible language of this type of film has been polished to a point where characters don’t even have to be given names, backstories, or personalities – all of this is filled in instantaneously based off of what we’ve seen before, and how they respond to our hero. I don’t even think that’s lazy or bad writing! In a drama, sure, it would be bad, because you want a world that exists in depth as well as in breadth, but in a movie that is more-or-less the extension of a single man’s ego? That’s called trimming the fat; making the story a leaner and purer slice of narcissistic hedonism. There is a clarity to the vision of these movies that oftentimes is obscured by how sirloin-stupid they are; almost every review of a movie like Die Hard 4, even positive ones, will mention something about the inherent dumbness of it all. Please don’t fall for that, because in the context of what the movie is trying to do – and we’ll get to the overall thrust of things soon – this type of writing is actually enviably efficient.

And how about those set pieces? Those, too, tip the hand of the psychological state that births a movie like this and those, too, represent a kind of culmination of a process designed to strip away anything that distracts us from the unquestioned point of focus and orientation in this movie’s universe, our hero’s throbbing and kingly crotch-bulge. To examine this let’s do away with the weird pop-quiz thing I did above and instead ask a less dumb question: what is the organizing principle of the set pieces in a movie like this? Everything needs some kind of organizing principle behind it, movie or otherwise. The decision-making process behind some new flavor of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream, which member of N*Sync you think about when you’re having sex with your girlfriend – all chosen based off of some invisible value system. So what can we deduce are the values underlying the choice of set pieces in this movie? They get bigger on a literal scale, sure, but that can be considered a consequence of big-budget film-making in general. But I’d like to propose another unifying principle behind the escalation of violence in Die Hard 4, and the entire cultural growth it is proudly a member of and metonymy (this is improper use of the word metonymy) for: Bruce Willis’s unplacatable fear that people might not be taking him seriously anymore. This has the benefit of also escalating the level of absurdity and violence, which appeases the suits (this is the proper use of the word metonymy) who sign the checks, but it also further makes the entire movie seem like a figment of our hero’s imagination, like he’s actually a middle-aged dad who fell asleep on the bus and is dreaming about how much more awesome life would be if he owned a Thunderbird. Much like the supporting characters only really being rendered visible when radiation from McClane’s weapons-grade machismo bounces off of them like some kind of virility-powered sonar, the set pieces also contribute to a cinematic language honed down to the sole purpose of make this man’s dreams manifest, subordinate the rest to his cause. And it makes perfect sense! Just like how the “dumb” screenplay and its paper-thin supporting (and, uh, main) characters are actually signs of the driving force behind an action blockbuster (narcissism!) honed to enviable focus, there is actually a fascinating amount of honesty and humanity in these increasingly-absurd set pieces. Think about it – you know what, you’re tired, it’s the end of the week, I’ll think about it for you: if I reached middle age and somehow still managed to be balanced, however precariously, atop the flaming pile of failed careers that is Hollywood, was still getting invited on the Tonight Show to remind everyone how the happy half live, you bet your ass I would take no comfort from any of my supposed accomplishments and in my anxiety over possible impending irrelevance insist that Goodbye, Cody 4: Cody 4 U (stylized either GC4:C4U or just a stencil of a massive penis) feature a scene in which I punch God so hard all religions are now retroactively based around the life-giving quality of my testicles. The scripts to these movies aren’t dumb, they’re ego flawlessly unfettered by considerations of other people, and the set pieces aren’t cartoonishly stupid, they are fascinating glimpses into the lengths a man will go to in order to convince himself he is actually, literally invincible, even though he knows he’s not, and it’s driving him mad.

Do Man-Droids Dream of Electric Peeps?

(I know I haven’t, actually, reviewed Die Hard 4 yet, or really mentioned anything specific about it. But this is the point I really wanted to get to, and I needed to run through the bizarre way in which visual storytelling and screenplay writing function in movies like DH4 so this section would make sense. So, to quickly reiterate: I like this movie, and I like it specifically for the traits I am describing. All forms of expression are just windows into the person and people who made them, and it’s fascinating to see where their head was at when they were making it, and how the evolution of their chosen form in-formed and shaped what they felt comfortable expressing and how they felt comfortable expressing it. You could portray your machismo quietly, and with great dignity and restraint, but that’s just not how the business of movies and the behavior of people allowed things to shake out. It’s a fascinating vein to follow, historically and psychologically.)

Now that we’re done setting the table, this is what I’ve been trying to get at: the part I find most interesting about pre-2008 action movies, the thing that makes all these supposed flaws or bone-headed stupidities actually riveting and fun to delve into from any number of perspectives: these movies are a collective exercise in fucking solipsism. Nothing is real outside of the massive, desperate ego of the person (McClane, Willis, take your pick, they’re essentially interchangeable from the standpoint of this analysis) around which the entire thing is oriented. In other genres (or in newer action movies) there is a compulsion to add something approximating an egalitarian worldview – or at least a willingness to share the formation of reality with someone else. But in these older movies it’s like we’re strapping on a VR helmet and finding out what it’s like to be a potato with huge biceps and no fear of anything past, present or future and that is also probably God. Movies like this are often called escapism, because it’s fun to pretend you’re John McClane, not taking shit, dishing out disproportionate amounts of your own shit, always having a dick-ish comeback that isn’t clever so much as a terse reminder that you simply cannot be troubled to donate a fuck to the conversation at hand, dropping some lady to her death in an SUV because she kicked you too hard and hurt your feelings (told you I’d mention that again! It was dope!) but I think that is only a surface-level analysis that doesn’t do the real, magnetic appeal of these movies justice: there is also the fascinating and bizarrely surreal feeling that you’re watching someone else’s dream, presented mostly unfettered, with the exact same psychological signposts and betrayals of deeper emotional states that the person having the dream can see, and probably wishes wasn’t so obvious in its deeper meaning – even with all the studio mandates, the beveling of the edges, the sheer artificiality of huge-budget film-making, there is something so human about these otherwise gargantuan, clunky, exercises in cinematic excess. I feel like I found a Monet painted on the side of a bathroom stall whenever I watch one. Or, like, the scribblings of a madman that, owing to some deeper, genetic-memory level of insight, actually contain a properly-structured haiku nestled somewhere in between the line “the babies, I must eat the babies,” and countless pictures of bleeding penises. These movies are a place you simply wouldn’t expect depth to be. I don’t even think they (those burly men making those movies) even planned to put depth there. That’s probably the thing that makes action flicks constructed in such a manner so human and relatable: the people attempting to make these movies rock-dumb testaments to their own enviable lack of self-reflection or capacity for doubt have actually seeded the entire thing with evidence of their own fragile humanity. It’s like writing a book entitled Reasons Why I’m Definitely Not Gay – you’ve only, in your fervor to make irrefutable one side of the argument, contributed evidence to the counter-argument! It’s a sham, basically, a weird crystal palace constructed by the mind of a man (not just Willis, but the power-players who live vicariously through him by making these movies) who probably never thought they’d achieve the level of cultural relevance they currently enjoy. These movies may not aspire to (or come anywhere close to achieving) Citizen Kane-levels of depth or complexity, but the psychological primordial ooze from which they used to so often spring had more than a little Kane to it: the sincerity, the ego, the embellishment, the hell-bent determination to live in a world crafted entirely by your own hand, sharing nothing, not even reality itself, with anyone else, the tragically-fleeting and necessarily-incomplete flashes of self-awareness and regret, reflexively subsumed back into a drive that feels it has gone too far, sacrificed too much to hesitate now. If someone were to edit the final stand-off in this movie with McClane whispering “Rosebud” before shooting Gabriel instead of yelling “yippee-ki-yay” I honestly think the scene would make exactly as much sense.

You Cannot Face-Punch That Which Has No Face to Face-Punch, or: When Dumb Has No Meat to Eat

I was on the fence about this section, because I wanted to focus on Die Hard 4 and Die Hard 4-adjacent phenomena. But to acknowledge these types of movies is to acknowledge that they are mostly dead (except for Tom Cruise movies, but those don’t count because of his exceptional thetan levels) and it only makes sense to touch, at least briefly, on what killed them, and how. OK, take a second to consider – yeah, you’re right, it was Marvel movies. I don’t want to talk at huge length (or, like, any length) about the merits of Marvel’s cultural ubiquity. There are so many articles about that. But what I do want to do is contrast Marvel’s approach to action movies with that of its Die Hard forerunners, and see how the older action movie was displaced, and what form, if any, that Die Hard DNA has taken in the modern context. 

With respect to writing, the entire sublimation process, the rendering of supporting characters into our protagonist’s ego-wallpaper, has mostly been replaced with a more egalitarian approach. This is a fancy way to say that something approximating real writing, with characters and arcs and what-have-you, are the order of the day. This is due mostly to the nature of shared universes: Burmurdobroch and his co-worker Asian lady would be given backstories and possibly sub-plots in the MCU simply because Marvel would want to be prepared in case one of the actors became a viral sensation on Twitter and in doing so primed their character for a standalone movie, or at least a larger role in subsequent films. But this whole process rings hollow for me: the turgid-levels of stupid from earlier movies, the almost sociopathic refusal to admit that people besides our ego-fueled hero even exist make for a compelling subtextual reading. The rote applications of “real” writing, conversely – you’ll never guess it, but the Avengers need to learn to work as a team, and also we’re a family, and families stick together, fart, fart, wheeze – to me actually come across as more artificial in many ways. It’s like one of those faux-woke companies that purports to put out locally sourced, humanely-produced organic ice cream, and the owner of the company has a beard and everybody at the company gets Kwanza off or whatever, but then you do some research and find out that all of the healthy, “superior” ingredients are just the company using some legal loophole to rename the same usual garbage that you find in older ice creams, and also that guy’s beard is fake. At least the older ice creams acknowledged that they were trying to kill you! It’s a weird inversion: older action movies promised you they were about nothing more than machismo and incuriousness even as they laid bare the insecurities of the men behind them, whereas newer action movies insist that it’s OK to cry sometimes even as their screenplays are written by logical computer programs that only even bother to mix in 2% character development because that’s what the algorithm calls for.

Even the set pieces of newer action movies have that algorithmic quality to them. There’s no Bruce Willis whispering in the director’s ear while the latter is trying to frame a shot, “a Harrier jet! I need to fight a fucking Harrier! I’m not getting any younger!” The set pieces in the MCU, and so many other modern franchises – Fast and the Furious and, and I can’t believe I’m writing this, the fucking Conjuring movies – all have this meticulously-focused-grouped dynamic at play, this constant effort to make everything, let’s call it generically stylish. Outside of Tom Cruise in the Mission Impossible movies (again, the lone surviving Man-Ego Franchise) where our favorite try-hard cooks up set-pieces specifically to remind you what a fit and powerful lad he is there just doesn’t seem to be any room in the landscape for anything other than set pieces designed to make sure everybody can “oww” and “aww” at demographically-appropriate times, like watching fireworks or something. And those MCU set pieces are still undeniably well-done! But for someone like me who obsessively tries to mine whatever I’m seeing and hearing on screen for evidence of the mentalities of the people making those images all I can picture is an assembly line worker being fed notes about what is trending on social media and then slightly altering the product accordingly.

This all adds up to a certain type of narcissism on the part of MCU movies and their ilk, but it is a fundamentally different narcissism than the endearingly oafish self-love that typifies the Die Hard crowd. Those movies were the result of a man finding himself in an inexplicable and unrepeatable situation – if a massive studio was willing to finance your ego, and the public was willing to watch you masturbate to pictures of yourself working out, what would you do, and how nervous would you be that this dream condition would eventually collapse, and how would that anxiety creep into the otherwise innocent milieu of you sitting on the edge of your bed slapping the salami to pictures of yourself sitting on the edge of a bench at the gym pounding the peperoni? There’s a lot a play, psychologically, and I am extremely fascinated by it all. But Marvel movies are typified by what I’m going to call brand narcissism – a Cluster B personality disorder for the age of analytics, meticulously-researched, self-aware enough to, however insincerely, undercut its own metastasizing share of the cultural air with performative modesty. There aren’t really any individuals shaping the events to fit their own ego because the spectacle, or the brand, is bigger than all of them. So instead we get this colorless and therefore apparently invincible narcissism that uses cold, beautiful math to avoid the same pitfalls that doom all traditional action vehicles eventually. It’s basically the difference between watching an aging Kobe go 4-26 but refusing to not keep shooting in a 20-point Lakers loss versus watching James Harden shoot 32 free throws in a Rockets/Nets win: the latter might be the result of space-age technology and lead to materially spectacular results but there’s something so human about the former, about the failure inherent in the ego, about how the staunchest of Real Men are driven by nearly catastrophic levels of fear and anxiety. It might be the only thing us norms have in common with them.

The End

I should like modern action movies more than those clunky big-boys from before the formula was cracked. They are, after all, made by people like me, far more than their predecessors, which were probably produced by dozens of men with matching Grim Reaper tattoos flexing as hard as possible until a blank canister of film placed in the center of a pentagram on the floor suddenly and instantaneously was filled with images of a man in a state of constant arousal over himself. But as I walk those high-walled marble halls of New Action Movies, with music from unseen sources always programmed to be playing one of my favorite songs in perfect synergy with my emotional state, the experience is more uncanny than a thrilling homecoming, like I’m watching the result of all of my personal information being stolen and crafted into some weird playpen for me to wander around in. The sheer intensity with which I am being made welcome makes me think the whole thing is a trap, or at least a scam. Conversely, the fact that older action movies like Die Hard 4 seem more intent on staring, transfixed, at their own genitals than even acknowledging my existence, seem to only see me to whatever extent they can use me to confirm their own existence by bouncing loud things off of my pale and inadequate form, is the kind of weird shit I can get behind. New action movies are wonderful in many ways, but they’re just too damn accommodating, too insistent that I should never notice anything strange when I’m watching them. I want to get that chance to see the world as it apparently plays out in front of the eyes of a supremely confident baked potato. I want the disorienting but inexplicably-Zen feeling of having the first few bars of any given AC/DC song – it doesn’t matter which one – blasted into my ears on endless loop, while I enjoy a level of idiot confidence rarely experienced by someone who looks up metonymy to make sure he’s using it right in a sentence and then makes a reference that only he will get about the fact that he used it wrong the first time. The momentary escape soothes me and the freedom of rolling around in my fleeting potato-form replenishes my very soul. So check out Die Hard 4, and its bumbling, kaiju-sized siblings, as they stomp around the downtown of your grey matter doing a baby’s impression of an adult; you just might glean some insight as to why they feel compelled to do this, which should instantly make you feel better about why you don’t.

No traumatic event precipitated the following post, which is good. No distasteful opinions burrowing, rodent-like, into the warm and innocent folds of my grey matter, ripping out axons longer than a baby’s arm in the effort, causing a rapidly-deteriorating me to somehow drool electricity while my level of control over basic motor function plunges steadily from “human” to “corn-on-the-cobb,” the entire process observed impassively by the only part of my mind worth preserving, my Movie Opinions, as they sip chamomile from the safety of a panic room that I constructed years ago in the part of the brain typically reserved for generating feelings of happiness. Nope, just writing about a criminally underseen movie in the hope that other people might want to see it, too. It’s a good flick!

Slow West 

I don’t know if you know this but the American frontier circa the mid-to-late nineteenth century was a Hard Place, a land pockmarked exclusively with Grim Poetry and stories constructed solely to remind listeners that stories have no purpose, showing out in this miserable fashion like the face of a syphilis-ravaged harlot on her way for another night of degradation and humiliation at the saloon, a never-ending carousel of nightly offenses and namelessly identical badmen popping in and out with clockwork regularity and no interest in her outside of how they can depress her spirits to depths matching her form, because you see war, war never changes, and a man must accept the harrowing reality of it all, how life’s pleasures and the capacity to weave events into meaningful narrative are nothing more than a weak delusion shielding you, a child, from the simple truth that your entire existence boils down to being either alive or dead with absolutely nothing in between, and how under a particularly unrelenting afternoon heat generated by that bastard the sun – the sick warden of this borderless prison, but at least he’s fair – the two conditions don’t seem so different after all, while the marrow of your very bones sublimates into a grosser kind of poison still, the kind that cripples a man in ways far worse than the physical, until he stalks these dunes as vile as the nature that birthed him.

The above sentiment is incredibly stupid and nearly turgid at the very thought of itself, so of course it has wormed its way into cultural ubiquity, rocketing like a top prospect in a minor league farm system from some vague image of “toughness, graduate student edition” that might flash half-formed across your mind after watching a John Wayne movie to a bronze-cast statue standing astride a castle built from semi-erect and easily-confused penises labeled “male insecurity.” Not all Westerns are like this, of course. Warlock approaches the difficulty of finding meaning against the towering indifference of it all with a soft and empathetic touch, and the True Grit remake grounds the usual Cohen Brothers’ nihilism against an engaging story of a haggard old lawman and a young woman who might be the only person alive as stubborn as he is. But it is, for the most part, a whole lot of wank, wank. It’s like seeing the sun-bleached skeletal remains of a steer touches something in the most primal part of a person’s brain, confirming some long-held (and I’m talking genetic memory, here, people) belief that nothing actually matters, that we’re all just here to eat, fuck, die, and be used as compost to grow another meaningless automaton of a meat bag with, and any argument to the contrary – one that posits, oh, I don’t know, the existence of literally anything other than the above offered – is just weakness and delusion. I guess there’s a whole opportunity for study latent in how universal this opinion sometimes seems to be but, try as I might to delve into it, to extricate some meaning, even for the purposes of a movie review, wank, wank. I think that might be the point.

John Maclean’s Slow West – which was his first fucking feature, the precocious scamp! – is brilliant not for charging with self-congratulatory heroism towards the glorious House of Dumb I have described above, aiming to destroy it penis-shaped-brick-by-cock-molded-mortar, one clever revisionist take at a time, but for just kind of shrugging, accepting that, well, maybe it was like that, who am I to say, and then, and this is the important part, still refusing to stare, hypnotized, at the insipid bog of Hard Truths that enraptures so many other writers of Westerns and instead asking himself what kind of story would spring from this nihilistic armpit, how would people respond and how would it inform their experience to be in a world built upon a canvas so imperfectly reclaimed from death and silence that even an origin story can’t help but be an elegy, and even the most meaningful moment is seemingly only ever allowed life to the extent that it can be used as a punchline by a comically indifferent universe. Instead of stopping at “well, I guess life sucks,” and rhapsodizing over that boring and unchallenging observation Maclean wonders aloud what kind of house you would build – what kind of house could you build – when the only material available is designed to collapse in on itself. The result is something that only seems subversive because the clarity of its conclusion is so contrary to the steaming piles of confused man-logic that have come before it, but in reality it is a vision admirably true to itself and looking to prove itself to no one.

You Zag All You Want, Big Guy, I’m Gonna Zig

Alright, so what does that last sentence of the previous section mean? I’m glad I asked. The usual conclusion arrived at when considering how to decide structure and form in a Western, how to depict a land steeped so in death and emptiness is basically, and it really does seem to boil down only to this, grimness in different flavors. You have your aggressively unromantic (Bone Tomahawk), your dignified insignificance (3:10 to Yuma), your elegiac (Unforgiven, making its second appearance in my first three posts; good job, Clint), etc. But Maclean’s approach is to acknowledge that this experience, one of constantly being butted up against sudden, unromantic, mean-spirited, blunt-to-the-point-of-being-kind-of-funny death would actually create a feeling of the uncanny more so than the grr grim-nuggins mcgoo. And this is fucking brilliant! We as the creators and consumers of stories alight upon the grim as our preferred vector of understanding the West because we’re not in any real danger when we do it. It’s the perfect dodge! It’s like the guy who rambles about his hypothetical behavior in bizarrely-specific situations. “If I was ever in a park and some guy showed up and started through knives at people I’d take him down with karate.” This is very dumb, and the conclusion to this weird scenario – “I would do something manly because men do manly things” – is borne from, among other probably more pronounced pathologies, the realization that said situation will never happen. But imagine if it actually did! Some jerkoff throwing a knife into your hand while you’re squinting at him from thirty paces and thinking to yourself “is that dude holding a throwing knife?” That’s not grim, it’s fucking surreal! Maclean realizes, wonderfully, that a life spent in the immediate company of death has more in common with the works of Hans Christian Andersen, or maybe Kafka, than John Wayne. And it’s not just satire, or irreverence, or an inability to understand the grimness of the word that causes him to reach this conclusion. The perpetual squint of John Wayne is the inability to understand the grimness of the world because portraying unrelenting death as a tough but reliable friend is fucking stupid. Death is depressing, and it destabilizes you and your perception of the environment in ways that would absolutely sometimes be funny and weird to other people, and even yourself! The uncanny can be more indicative of tragedy than the performatively miserable, or the indulgently austere.

I Specialize in Landscapes

The discontinuous nature of the environments visited in the story helps to prove this point. There’s usually a unifying visual theme in Westerns, that of sparsely-populated-but-overwhelmingly-massive-indifference, that reminds us of the ubiquity of death in this world, this place, and how it stretches to every visible border and beyond. Wide shots, is what I’m saying. And the more yellows and browns the better; remember, there’s nothing out here except your meaningless demise. But Slow West, that big playful pig, instead marches Silas and Jay through a series of tightly-framed and visually-diverse environs. We have the ashen-forest in which they meet, the purple fields they ride through early on in their time together, the forest surrounding Rose’s farm, the supply store in the middle of nowhere, and on, and on, like the turning of pages in a storybook. In almost all of these places people die, just like in a “normal” Western; hard and horrible they go, because Maclean doesn’t deny the fucking rudeness of the world. But it’s in the response, how the physical landscape is perceived by the characters that Slow West does its best work. To drift from one instance of pointless and easily-avoided death to another doesn’t put hair on Jay and Silas’s chests, it puts them in a fucking fugue state, each instance of life snatched so cruelly and so suddenly away that it would be insane and inhuman to treat these instances like some welcome organic whole, some confirmation of Life’s Hard Truth, so instead they are hermetically-sealed into their own tragic micro-story by a brain totally not ready for this shit, desperately and for its own sanity compartmentalizing all this otherwise overwhelming sadness into a series of storybook-framed murder dioramas, where the bodies will remain, somehow excised from our continuing world and their ghosts locked safely away (hey, remember the very end of the movie, when we visit the corpses of those who died along the way? Almost like we’re flipping back through the pages of the book, isn’t it, like being reminded of the sad evolutionary chain that brought us here, sure, but also being reminded that, there they are, the dead, still preserved in their isolated storybook pages) from the more impressionable elements of our minds. What may seem like irreverence is anything but; it’s a truer representation to how a person would respond to a world carved from death than anything generated by a salty and weathered protagonist squinting emptily into a meaningless sun. And talking about the landscape is only part of the story, because the people who populate these pages derive sanctuary this way, too.

Of Course It’s a Fairy Tale

Let’s go back to that supply store for a second. Physically it’s storybook-esque, but let’s look at the guy who runs it. He specifically points out to the man robbing him, whom he will shoot dead in a few moments, and whose wife will shoot him dead shortly thereafter, that robbing the store is pointless because it’s the only place for miles where money can even be spent. This could be considered just an irreverent commentary on the undeveloped nature of the territory they’re in but it also stresses that the supply store owner himself is preserving his own mind in a kind of insular storybook logic; he’s the Merchant, doing Merchant Things, even if those things don’t in any way link up to, oh, I don’t know, an economy or society or anything even vaguely practical. He’s in the middle of fucking nowhere, setting up shop in a place where money is completely useless! But he takes some solace in it; it allows him to have a Role in all of this, and speak empathetically, even kindly, to people who are robbing him, one of whom will kill him soon, one of whom he will kill. The saddest moment of the whole sequence, to me, isn’t even when they all exchange lead and die, Tarantino-style, it’s the exact moment when the store owner pulls his rifle out, because that’s when he accepts the futility of his own narrative against the ubiquity of a hard death, acknowledges that his protected and personable status of Merchant has now been rendered a wafer-thin joke of a shield by the inevitable arrival of the real law ‘round these parts, the presence that really came through that door when all the audience saw was two incompetent thieves. There’s no waxing moronic about this like you’d see in other Westerns, no monologues about the hardness of life, as if the state of being dead was the real character being studied, the real and necessary target of our empathy or, stranger still, our admiration; Maclean makes sure the characters are our eternal focus and the things that happen to them are understood as being thrown into sharper relief by the omnipresent nature of death, with death itself never being granted the honor of receiving a focused or empathetic cinematic gaze.

And how about the story told towards the end of the movie – and this is one of my favorite sequences in the whole film – by one of the posse members? His recollection of trying to convince his riding partner that he’s a wanted man to satisfy the young man’s idiot ego (itself an entire kind of sub-storybook storybook moment that further illustrates just how pervasive this preserving logic really is) is another example of a person being so broken by the nonstop fascination with death swirling all about him that he attempts compartmentalize it in the form of a story. He’s sad about the young man’s outlook on life, sad about what happened in his own attempts to quell the boy’s bloodlust, even if the other bounty hunters just think the point of the story is nothing more than a cheap laugh. He’s structuring his grief and regret and his own mental unwinding at living in this awful world in the form of a story irreverently told and presented because it’s not just the physical landscape that takes flight to the uncanny to protect itself it’s also the minds of the people who live there. Once again, Maclean doesn’t avoid painting his frame with nihilism; he accepts that as a consequence of the genre. But he uses those brush-strokes to throw the human element of the story into sharper and oftentimes surreal relief, always stressing what death means to them, rather than just obsequiously rendering loving portrait after loving portrait of loss and misery, some weird cult-like worship of a thing you’re typically not supposed to be a fan of.

A Grim and Inevitable Marriage

So what does this all lead to, this weird footrace between Death and How We Respond to It, Seriously Someone Help Me Preserve My Humanity? Well, it’s a movie, so, a climax. And while Slow West doesn’t disappoint from a traditional standpoint of bringing all our through-lines together into a shooty-bang-bang finale it also excels spectacularly at bringing together fully, for the first time, its own conception of the consequences of life lived against an indifferent death and the takeaway that pretty much everybody else has. So while we can be entertained by the final shootout (and we should be! It’s really good!) we can also appreciate the salt in the wound, the moment when the preserving power of whimsy and the unrelenting hand of death have been commingling for so long that they’ve finally just decided to join narrative forces, like each one has just confessed that if they were a woman the one man they would have sex with would be John Stamos, and then they ran off to do karate together in the basement. The brutality of the final sequence (Rose’s dad just unceremoniously shot without a word in his own defense, Jay’s mortal wound coming courtesy of his distracted and, yes, as a result momentarily indifferent, lady) is butted up against how surreally beautiful the farm is, the startling yellows of the field around the house almost hard to make out under a sky nearly impossibly blue. I mean, when Kotori fires that arrow into the corn field to smoke out/hopefully murder their assailants we get a shot of the projectile flying through the air that looks like it’s something out of a fucking Wes Anderson movie. And what about when Ben Mendelsohn shoots the other bounty hunter, emerging from behind the scarecrow to do it? That shot is so damned blue-sky-gorgeous that it takes a second to fully process that murder is happening. We’re seeing in these moments the sanctifying unreality that these people have been forced to alight upon for the purposes of self-preservation locked in a dead heat with that ever-present fatalism that will be good-and-goddamned if it’s giving up the narrative steering-wheel that easy. There are two (well, three) interests at stake in the final shootout from a plot standpoint, but we’re also watching the human desire for some kind of narrative outside the auspices of death locked in mortal heat with old Dead-y himself, and that fight is just as interesting, and told with masterful simultaneity.

The End

I want this stinky Leroy in under ten-ish pages, so we’re keeping this part short: So Jay is a moron, I guess, and each step he took in his fantasy of seeing Rose again was only another purchase made on the ledger of life’s eternal bookie, an account forever culminating in an interest payment that takes the form of your own moment of inglorious kersplat-ness. But, fuck, he still made it to that house, didn’t he, borne more than a little bit on the currents of some clearer kind of water than the tepid stuff all the other Western protagonists more-or-less slosh around in, never too bothered by how brown it all is? Hell was coming for the kid either way; at least being a delusional weenie helped him stay ahead of it for a little longer than someone insufferably looking forward to their own demise.

Was talking with some friends recently and one of them told me that he never got more than a few minutes into There Will Be Blood because he found it boring and seemingly lifeless, if not completely pointless, for all its masterfully-rendered portent. This opinion haunts me like the shingles, flaring up whenever I think I’m about to enjoy a relaxing evening. Also like the shingles one day the flare-up will occur directly in my grey matter and kill me. But before that happens I must defend Paul Thomas Anderson’s wonderful film. Let’s get to work.

A Quick Defense of There Will Be Blood

Roger Ebert provided what has become a fairly common take on There Will Be Blood in his 2008 review of Paul Thomas Anderson’s fifth feature. In the review, the legendary Movie Opinion Haver said that Anderson’s film “is easily called great. I am not sure of its greatness… in its imperfections (its unbending characters, its lack of women or any reflection of ordinary society, its ending, its relentlessness) we may see its reach exceeding its grasp.” He then did that thing you do when you want to equivocate but you also want to sound smart while you’re equivocating because he immediately followed that assessment with the tempering and mollifying, and maybe even a little bit hedging, appendage that having a reach that exceeds your grasp “is not a dishonorable thing.” This is basically how a smart person says “I’m pretty sure this movie is a fart in the wind, but my word what a rip.” Such a butt-and-fart-based analysis of There Will Be Blood has, like I said, become a fairly rote talking point; it’s like saying that Nickelback sucks, or that ham is good. But while I can see why people would alight upon this opinion I think it’s fundamentally off-base and misses a genius, however uncomfortably rendered that genius may be, that runs throughout the story, a deeper reading that renders its ostensible story deliberately inadequate, and in the contrast making its truer, viler narrative more grossly fascinating.

Let’s Just Lay It Out There

I try to avoid a couple of things in defending or explicating movies because they always strike me as reductive and insulting to the complicated nature and thrilling emotional depth of a film. Things like “you have to understand that x actually represents y” or some belabored conceit (“I want you to pretend that the movie is a boat. Do you see the waves? Those waves represent conflict, but also opportunity. Now, if you’ll just look at this Venn Diagram…”) don’t just come across as smug and douchey but also imply that you can solve a movie the way you would an equation, as if there is some answer that will make the whole thing click. I don’t think that life or movies really work like that. I don’t even think math works like that. But in this case damned if I don’t keep coming back to the same belabored conceit every time I try to explain what I mean when I talk about the movie’s “truer, viler” narrative. So let’s just use the fucking thing and hopefully I can make the rhetorical device less clunky in the offering: There Will Be Blood is basically a horror story wearing the pelt of a recently-slayed hero’s journey. The ostensible narrative that so many find lacking (a somber meditation on greed! and family! and the birth of modern American capitalism! and religion, oh, yeah, religion!) can better be understood as a weak and bloody disguise that doesn’t exactly, uh, achieve much verisimilitude, as the dead outer coat keeps sidling back and forth, eye holes never quite matching up and, oh, yeah, the monster underneath is much larger than the skin it’s trying to hide under (whether the partially-obscured narrative is simply too feral to understand that its disguise is inadequate or is actually smart as hell and just doing it to fuck with everyone is never specified, which works to the movie’s morbid benefit). The much more engaging story is the story of the thing lurking underneath the ruins of the traditional narrative, and how this newer and darker creature obliterated any attempt at a “real” hero’s journey simply by virtue of its own size, and how focusing on the movie as a whole on those (admittedly esoteric) terms and through that lens makes the film’s run-time more coherent, chilling, and engaging. And I think there is real evidence for this reading, so much so that I’m confident I’m not just over-analyzing things, and that I will now try to prove with section names I have thought about far too much.

Mouths That Open From Nothing to Nowhere

One of the specific pieces of evidence that this friend, this Haver of Troublesome Opinions, offered up to me was the observation that the movie just starts. Daniel Plainview is introduced in profile already swinging his pickaxe with a furious and nearly inhuman tattoo that seems to imply he’s been at this, creepily indefatigable, for a long-ass time. There’s no context, no introduction, no backstory, nothing tragic about him, no wife or children mentioned (ones will be fabricated eventually, but that of course doesn’t count). Right off the bat, my friend was telling me, he had nothing to grab onto as a viewer. And I think this is a valid point! If you are trying to hitch yourself to the traditional narrative structure then this movie gives you no hand-holds. But I don’t think that’s an accidental failure on Anderson’s part. I think the inaccessible beginning (and middle, and end) of this movie is brilliant and deliberate, because it is establishing the geometry of the real story, one that is so fucking large and disturbingly outside the possible parameters of any film, even one epic in scope and runtime, that there can be no handhold, only the sliding and grating of more human behaviors (like pickaxing, or dragging your busted ass across the desert) along the massive canvas of its body. The real monster being portrayed in this movie is just too damn big to ever access, to understand, so we (understandably) alight on trying to access and understand Plainview, but he’s so indoctrinated, so enraptured by the presence that lurks behind the events of the movie that he’s equally inaccessible, and frustrations mount. It’s when you understand the movie’s bizarrely flat structure as a form of reverence (or possibly submission) to the nearly Lovecraftian horror always at work behind its more immediate conflict that things start to get juicy.

And this continues. Plainview is a bearded prospector in 1898 chipping away at rock in search of something precious. Years immediately jump by and he’s a little better groomed and a lot better off and now has his joyfully mean and completely polarized eyes set on oil. A few more years go by and he’s well-established, at least locally, and is wearing both a fine tweed suit and the stolen life of a child as he peddles his reassuringly devil-like presence to stupid people. This all happens quickly and without commentary, which is frustrating as hell to viewers. Where’s the scene where H.W. asks him uncomfortable questions, and Plainview is forced to reckon with how much evil he has already done, and done still so early in the story? Why is everything just glossed indifferently over? I think about this as time, like most action, being rendered insignificant on purpose. The “true” story, the one my brain always alights on, is one of an intoxicating, fully inhuman presence that has been unloosed, has consumed Plainview, and guides him through the actions of the story in a way that is completely ignorant of how a story is “supposed” to be told. We’re watching mold grow, or a body decay. There are no bumps or hand-holds, only a process you are meant to be disturbed by, whose inhumanness is manifest, which simply grows over and obscures, denies from us as viewers, any kind of context or readability.

An Entire Family Born Outside

And this notion of everything being subordinate to the monster includes Plainview himself. He’s a human vessel for the presence, and the one the camera, you know, follows around, so we call him our protagonist. But he’s just one of many limbs doing the work of the invisible body, and in my estimation is not held in higher or lower esteem than anything or anyone else. It’s only from the literal requirements of how the story must be told (i.e., the camera has to follow someone) that he becomes our “protagonist.” Plainview, the uniquely Western conception of capitalism, the discontinuities (Paul? Eli?) of the world they live in are all indoctrinated limbs of the monster. Lives are simply rewritten, rules are overrun with indifference. H.W. has his life reconstituted, like shards of metal rearranging themselves in a powerful enough magnetic field, to better fit the whims of the monster. Plainview just kind of says things, reality to him being completely insignificant outside of “what will better facilitate the growth of the poison” (I realize this can be chalked up to him simply being a sociopath who is trying to make a sale, but there is such a weird sonorousness to his lies, and the scenes are filmed with such unnerving implication, like there is a phantom tongue talking just behind his more immediate one, that it always makes me think of a deeper prerogative for his behavior). An outsider – poor fucking moron – tries to get in on the alternate-reality magic but he hasn’t breathed the fumes, doesn’t disbelieve in reality enough to replace wide swaths of it with his own (or something else’s) whims and will. He can’t make himself monstrous enough because the monster hasn’t inhabited him, and when the real monster smells him out…

(The next segment would, under normal circumstances, be about the existing power structures bearing witness to the rise of the monster, and how they respond to it, and their inevitable defeat at the hands (tendrils?) of said monster. And then somewhere after that I’d comment on the soundtrack. But the score to this movie is too good – and I think helps facilitate my point enough – that I’m bumping it up one.)

Sounds of An Alien Birth

I keep talking about the “real” movie hiding behind the ostensible one, and how its presence can be felt by degrees, indirectly, by tracing curious and seemingly incongruous moments back to the source. I don’t think there’s a better example anywhere in the movie of this occurrence than that genius fucking score. The closer we come to the monster’s presence being felt at any given moment the more Jonny Greenwood’s all-time great soundtrack flares disturbingly and with disproportionate presence into the aural foreground. That score is like a fucking Geiger counter for monstrous intent. And it is used so wonderfully improperly that I really think it’s done on purpose. Scenes that should be triumphant (Plainview and his crew hauling up a manual drill that is drenched in oil after its most recent drop, proving that they’ve struck it rich) are instead awash in this hideously alien sound, reminding us that none of this is good. As Plainview’s business expands throughout the movie (flatly, un-constricted in any real capacity, ignoring the usual pitfalls-and-roadblocks approach that you’d see in, you know, a movie) it is set to a score that just kind of wails like a dying animal, like something terrible is being birthed. Having your soundtrack act as counterpoint to the events on the screen is nothing new in cinema, but the harrowing, inhuman mournfulness that accompanies growth and movement and character and touch and even the slightest trace of incipient feeling is done so masterfully that you can practically see one of the monsters legs stepping into frame and pushing back off again whenever those damn instruments play.

Lesser Predators and the End of the Old Magic

There’s a scene in Unforgiven where English Bob, a feared badman in his native country, comes to America with a bit of pomp swirling about him. A gentleman gunhand, rolling towards a town built entirely on the proudly unimaginative parameters of the old American West? Well, here comes the culture and the hard hands, boys, because English Bob is going to teach you manners while keeping every last speck of dirt off of his ivory handles! Prepare to encounter what cultured violence can do, you filth-loving reductionists! Anyway, he rolls into town and promptly gets his shit ruined in a way that he not only didn’t see coming but clearly didn’t think it was possible, basic rules of human engagement and empathy just kind of assumed to be in place to prevent even the worst and humiliating ass-tattooing from descending too deep into the “medieval, just because we can” territory.

I think about that scene a lot when Standard Oil comes to town to try and buy out Plainview. They are the worst and most driven men they know, thinking – probably proudly – that they represent the apex of capitalism’s capacity for both progress and cruelty, the kind of people who enjoy reading about robber barons because who doesn’t want to see their name in Harper’s Weekly? They’re going to go out to this backwater area and its backwater “business people” and strangle them with the erudite and mostly indifferent gloves of a more gentlemanly-cruel capitalism, the kind that ruins you while squeezing your back shoulder affectionately, possibly even leaving you a little something left over after the robber-baron-ing is over, because aren’t they supposed to be gentleman monsters? Anyway, just like with English Bob the best-laid plans of smug, smug men go shit sideways and Plainview scares the entourage into nearly fleeing the meeting site as he at one point, flatly and brusquely – with an almost primal tick turning his sonorously cruel voice even more violent than usual – tells one of the men that he’s going to slit the out-of-towner’s throat. This is not a depth to which they thought a conversation could descend, and they are helpless and scared shitless. They are seeing something, like English Bob did, that they not only haven’t seen before, but didn’t think was possible.

“Yes, yes,” the viewer says, “another scene of how unapproachable and nearly inhuman Daniel Plainview is. I’ll file it away with the others.” But I think the way in which he doesn’t just negotiate with the men, how he instead disturbs them, and how it is these men in particular chosen by the film to receive this bizarre welcome to the West, is a telling decision with a lot more depth than “scene #2421 of Plainview reminding us he is a sociopath.” Anderson is deliberately introducing the extant and ubiquitous status quo – the unseen but constantly referenced, if not feared and revered Standard Oil –out here in this place where the fucking darkness has been unleashed, so smugly thinking that they will dominate this locale like they dominate everything else, only to turn tail and run like fucking Shaggy and Scooby when they realize the house is l-l-l-l-like totally haunted, man. We’re not just watching another empty scene: the bile is rising, and is starting to go national.

Which brings us to Paul, and the church. If we’re talking existing power structures and the way those power structures operate and the response those power structures have to whatever the fuck Daniel Plainview is (above and beyond merely being a sociopath) then the church is clearly the closest thing to what our friendly murderer-prospector has become, or is being controlled by, which makes their interactions even more interesting than the ones with Standard Oil. The church in this movie is a soft-shoe grift meant to imply not just intimacy with the monster, but more essential still the capacity to control it (for three easy payments of $19.99!). None of these showmen, these practitioners have truly encountered the monster before, wouldn’t know what to make of it if they saw it, but stories exist out in the timber, and if you throw a little opportunity for human redemption amidst the power of destruction latent in this undeveloped world then, bam, prosperous new church, and a whole flock of gooey-eyed followers. Notice how Plainview mocks this whole construct, especially during his final confrontation with Paul. He doesn’t denigrate the huckster for trying to control people, he mocks him for being such a (sorry) little pussy about it, for the shrill voices and the dances and the hugging of old women and the pandering and the storytelling. Plainview or the presence behind him isn’t disgusted by the thirst for control he’s disgusted by the method of control being little more than song and dance and misdirection – the need for attention, for theatrics, all satisfying some vile human need that prevents Paul and his ilk from any type of real ascension into the gloriously-freeing madness that Plainview enjoys. Plainview is inhabited by the spirit; Paul pretends he is. Of course he crushes his fucking head with a bowling pin.

So What’s the Point?

There have been other movies about a fundamentally broken presence or person haunting its frames. Nightcrawler is a recent one that springs to mind, and it is brilliant. But that movie still feels the need to accommodate the audience’s expectation, to give the film a point – however darkly satiric that point may be – to make the viewing experience smoother and more familiar. Gyllenhaal’s character does follow the hero’s journey from down-on-his-luck-protagonist to top-of-his-game big boy, and while this is done in a very dark way as a commentary on the industry he’s in and society at large it’s still telling that the movie wants to keep him incased in familiar narrative structures – i.e., to make sure there is a point the audience can keep coming back to for reference and, let’s call it narrative orientation. There Will Be Blood lets its conception of the monster loose with such abandon that the fucking thing just kind of blows the parameters of the movie into shreds with the meagerest movements of its body, and it is disorienting and terrifying and casts us down this alternative route of “progress” in the story that resembles more a virus eating away at a body – steadily, unrelentingly, without commentary or passion – than any type of undulating, highs-and-lows narrative structure that you might be more familiar with. This is not a hero’s journey: it is the unnarrated ascension of some darker instinct from conception to control. It was there even before we saw Plainview swinging that pickaxe – that was just our first unobstructed view of the creature’s influence on men and women and the world at large. It is clearly implied to be growing still even after the end, after Paul’s brains has been mopped up and disposed of and the boy forgotten by time. There’s no reason to believe, because this presence is not confined to the time-and-space limitations that Plainview’s own “arc” is subject to, that the bile hasn’t already made its way back east nestled in the coats and in the eyes and in the minds of the men he defeated at the negotiating table all those years ago, hungrily looking forward to its next ascension, which will again occur with complete indifference to narrative structure.

The End

I don’t think that what I’ve offered is some kind of solution to enjoying the movie, or that you’re watching it “wrong” if you don’t jive with my reading or share the context of my emotional relationship with the film, and I’m still more than a little wigged out at how closely my self-consciously smarty-pants blog post is trending towards being the written version of a YouTube “The TRUE Story of Modern Family, Explained (It is Disgusting)!!!” video. Hell, you might agree wholeheartedly with my reading but still feel that the movie fails even on these darker merits and parameters, or that the proposal I’m making, while real, is a sad and empty substitute for a more traditional narrative, one that would have gotten these same points across while grabbing you more. But I’ve never been able to shake the notion, even from the first time I watched the film, that I was actually watching this weird, invisible, Lovecraftian body moving about the frame and influencing all of the visible behaviors, to the point where I started to kind of just not see the more familiar narrative for all guts and tendrils I assumed it had been blown to. Ultimately, I’m just grateful that Anderson has given us such a challenging film – for whatever reason it turned out so challenging – and wish more people would give it a shot. It’s a damn fine picture, and well worth your time! Happy Fourth, everyone.

You don’t understand what they did to you until you try to leave. How arbitrary violence abstracted the day into fearful ritual; how pain was made normal so it would feel deserved; how language was crippled to make the cage seem smaller; how only silence was spared. These things only become clear later.

It’s weird being hated for no reason. Obvious violence enjoys all the usual cruelties, but violence of no clear origin is an infection of being – recast a mind in terms of the very thing it can’t understand, and that mind will lose the ability to trust itself, will become literate only in the language of its own abuse. The damnation here is masterful – make the signs of suffering grotesque enough, and the target stops appearing sympathetic to the people around them. They stop appearing sympathetic to themselves.

And what about the first time you find yourself looking back at a pair of guileless eyes, eh? Heh, heh, well, that’s a grim one, too. Here you are, trying to exist without living, trying to approximate an emotion by the tracing the edges of its negative space, and shit’s getting weirder by the second. Trying to find a single human word when you’ve never been given a human vocabulary is as crazy-making as it gets. But what’re you supposed to do? How’re you supposed to express love without actually feeling it?

If you can’t even say hello properly, what else are you doing wrong?

Are you even smiling right?

Time goes by, and there’s nothing you can do about it. The whole thing never stops feeling wrong, but you get used to it. You already know where this is going – your intellect was never kneecapped, remember, just the other stuff – so now it’s just a matter of waiting until you’ve drifted far enough from where you could have been that you can see the entire other life as its own living body, a home of absent space.

When everything you were positive was going to come after “hey” is given to someone else the only company you have left will be the things that never happened. A face willfully misremembered, its better angles always turned away; voices in a wavering pitch; lies stubborn enough to send proper time the long way around; anachronisms so hungry to be seen they’ll settle for being mocked. Misery, with a purpose – if you can define every missing piece in terms of another then you’ve made the problem deliberately unsolvable. So you’ll never be done with it. So you will never have to watch it end. So you’ll never have to admit that it’s gone.

It occurred to me while I was writing this that nobody would ever want to read a ten-page review of a movie that everybody has already forgotten about, so with a keen eye for necessary edits and a curbing of my own tendency towards verbosity I managed to trim it down to twenty pages. I’m sorry.

Army of the Dead

There’s a shot early on in Zack Snyder’s Army of the Dead when a paratrooper, for some reason, is dropped directly into a horde of zombies. You could head-canon this weirdness away by telling yourself that he was supposed to land somewhere, uh, safer, but in the chaos of attempting to evacuate the few remaining humans from the grips of Las Vegas’s zombie apocalypse shit went sideways and our poorly-oriented flyboy simply became another casualty of both the end-times and the kind of flailing, just-jump-out-of-the-plane-and-I-promise-we’ll-have-a-second-part-to-this-plan-before-you-hit-the-ground style of playcalling that could only pass as a plan during the end-times. You could even go so far as to call this harrowing image good visual storytelling, as it successfully planted in your mind the seeds of a greater conflict: the fear and the fury and the sheer weirdness of what has engulfed the City of Sin and rendered the most powerful nation in the world completely impotent in its response. You could be chilled by how uncanny the apocalypse appears to be, how nearly dreamlike death has been rendered as incredulity, basic survival instinct, hubris, tacky architectural design, seemingly unkillable monsters, and more than a splash of post-modernism have been cocktailed together into something no one saw coming or has any type of logical response for, and against whose surreal inevitability an otherwise extremely pro-noise public has been reduced to a death-accepting fugue-state, the mind abandoning the body to a parallel kind of zombie-dom in order to spare itself the misery of feeling that first bite, to say nothing of the last. You would, in conjuring this meticulous and legitimately compelling framework against which to contextualize Captain Parachute’s demise, be doing an admirable amount of narrative heavy-lifting and some damn fine world-building, too. You would also, by this movie’s own standard of intellectual and emotional sincerity, be an idiot, a nerd, definitely a spaz, and absolutely deserving of mockery, because the idea that there’s anything going on behind the baroque nihilism of a soldier being lowered into a vat of hungry death, that there is some land of deeper thought made accessible by the grim privilege of its presented affect, is an absurdity to the nearly religious devotion that Army has towards greasy nothingness as the fundamental argument of human life, this depressing belief in the diarrhea-soaked destiny of all human moments, and the weird – and I mean fucking strange – sense of responsibility the film feels to not just advocate this dumbass pretend-philosophy but to do so with as much hideous glee as the obligations of narrative will allow.

(The real point of The Man Who Would Be Dinner’s oopsie fall, the detail that the movie truly wants you to focus on – and this point will prove to be bizarrely important as we go along  – is that there isn’t so much fear on the his face as he approaches his gruesome demise, nor the paralyzing realization of just how fucked humanity might be against these horrifying creatures, but rather a general air of shittiness – a strange, vapid petulance angrily exuded from his every doomed pore as Mr. Delicious floats on down to Murder Avenue, like he seems unable to actualize the very concept of death and views this whole, uh, bugaboo he finds himself in to be more of an inconvenience and embarrassment than the moment before the fucking lights go out. It’s like he’s just too dumb to realize he’s going to die, even though he really obviously is about to, and it renders his response completely incongruous with what’s going on around him. The drama and the import and the scope of human conflict uncorked by the zombie apocalypse may not have been lost on you, but they sure as shit were lost on him.)

Army of the Dead is a bad movie. It’s bad for a myriad of technical and conventional reasons, but that’s not a big deal. There are a lot of technically and conventionally bad movies, and some of them are actually kind of great. Many of them are at least good. But Army’s badness is fundamentally different from these other, more earnest failures, in a way that at times appears to only be tangentially related to filmmaking as an art form, though it may manifest itself in every aspect of said form; no, however much this movie may blow in the, let’s call it classical sense of the word “bad” (and by the truth-delivering light of the stars above it fucking sucks) it fails much more spectacularly, actually rather stunningly, at something more basic than filmmaking, something baked so fundamentally into the concept of storytelling – of existing, more or less, in any capacity that lists human among its features – that you wouldn’t even think to assess it the same way you would assess, say, the use of chiaroscuro in the lighting, or the internal logic of the screenplay; it’s a quality I honestly didn’t think could be a movie’s downfall because it seems like anyone capable of making a movie in the first place would have to have already, by definition, worked out its basic structure, if not its more compelling intricacies: the ability to use a single, sincere emotion to craft an environment across which basic empathetic engagement can take place. We’re not talking about something you go to film school to learn about, we’re talking about something you go to fucking pre–school to learn about, and are typically expected to get down right around the time you get good at remembering to raise your hand and ask to go to the bathroom instead of just shitting yourself.

Shitty Shit vs. Being Shit-Shitty

This is a fascinating split to me, one whose inherent incongruities (a professional storyteller with nothing but contempt for the entire thing stories were invented to do) never fail to make me feel like I just tried to play the drum part on “YYZ” using only my fucking face, so I really want to be specific about what I mean: a bad movie is, to me, a human story told poorly – whether it’s stiff or inexperienced actors or an uninspired director or a disastrous shoot or lack of a budget or Brett Ratner or studio interference in the editing process or somehow Brett Ratner again or any other of the countless pitfalls a film can fall victim to as it attempts to mimic the quirky gait of the human experience. A bad movie wants to invoke feeling-by-proxy; it just doesn’t quite get there. There’s nobility in the effort, though, and I really mean it when I say that a lot of bad movies are worth our time. But Army of the Dead just doesn’t deserve even this qualified place on the podium. This is because it doesn’t just fail in the try, it doesn’t even not try at all, it – and I’m still at a loss as to how I can phrase this properly – actively fights against telling a human story, against even putting itself in a position to fail; it instead settles recalcitrantly from its opening moments into a self-consciously spiteful standard of interaction with its audience that, no matter how much I try to reconcile it away as the result of some technical failure, like gallows humor poorly implemented, or a director juggling more tones and styles than he’s comfortable with, or edgelord-iness, seems to come from nothing more than a place of real, actual contempt for anyone dumb enough to want to like this film. This is the angriest and most fucking miserable zombie-heist-action-comedy I’ve ever seen. Army of the Dead is a movie that wants you to feel dumb for liking movies. It wants you to feel dumb for liking anything. It’s not sarcastic, or grim, or challenging some sacred notions of propriety that us pearl-clutchers just aren’t real enough to appreciate – I’m not the dad from Footloose quite yet. It’s just that this movie truly seems to hate existing, a trait rendered even stranger and more unsettling when you consider just how much effort it puts into existing. It’s like Ouroboros swallowing its own tail but instead of doing so as anarcho-cosmic commentary on the unfathomable cyclicality of existence it’s more in the service of the grim satisfaction of being able to continuously desecrate your own body while never being granted the relief of death – or just the thrill of being able to eternally shit into your own mouth.

This is very weird, making a movie that is basically is a very expensive and expansive middle finger to the notion of making movies! Army is that kid sitting in the back of the classroom calling everybody else a faggot for trying to solve the problem on the board. And it’s that constant need to remind everyone watching, and to remind them on the grandest terms possible, just how little the movie cares about anything that I can’t fully wrap my brain around – in fact, I’d go so far as to say that Army’s carefully planned spite might be just about the only thing even vaguely interesting about the film, because there’s some psychological, maybe even emotional, bent that must be informing the decision to hate all things always. It makes me wish the movie was a different movie entirely, one that turned the camera around and became a Herzog or maybe von Trier-esque character study of the type of person who would try this hard to make a motion picture for the sole purpose of expressing how much they loathe the entire reason people make motion pictures.

A Master of His Craft

I’m not sure I have much to say about Zack Snyder that hasn’t already been said before. Dude’s weird. He seems genuinely pleasant in every media appearance I’ve ever seen him in, grinning and excitable and earnestly engaging with his interviewer as he explains to them that in his next movie Superman is going to disembowel Lex Luthor because holding yourself to higher standards than your opponent is dumb or that Batman is going to call Catwoman a cunt or that Watchmen is his favorite comic because it has rape in it. It’s like the dude was down in the emotion mines with the rest of us, drudgingly introducing pickaxe to rock while trying to understand this damned thing called life when he struck a vein that spurted out a noxious black tar that literally any other human would have immediately identified as misery, only investigating the gross pitch for as long as it took them to confirm their suspicion. But Snyder, being a card I guess, only threw back his head and screamed “Gold! Black Gold! And it’s all Daddy Snyder’s!” He remains immensely proud of his discovery to this day, seemingly oblivious to the fact that every else already knew about it, has known about it since the dawn of fucking civilization, and actively tries to avoid it. But he goes out in public wrapped in his tar-juice like a rapper showing out in full ice to show the world, baby, I made it. It informs everything he makes, from this movie to his bizarrely inhuman superheroes who have nothing but contempt for the people they only very reluctantly save, all the while doing everything short of asking one another, “Why can’t we just fucking kill everyone? I mean, we’re Gods, right?” I truly find the man fascinating, because he is endlessly impressed by his own incuriousness, like he concluded long ago that blitheness is a cultural Rosetta Stone that presents the world to you on its truest terms. Everything he makes is a towering monument to how far you can go, how tall of a structure you can build, if you just don’t give a shit about what you’re making, and if you’re secretly excited that it might tip over.

Let’s Start at the Beginning: The Origins of Ugh

I’ll give the man this, though: there is a purity to his dumb and pointless vision. A kind of “Michelangelo spending four years working on the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling” level of studiousness about him as he frowns across his palate, his canvas, before finally settling on the Asparagus Green shade of shit that he wants to smear across the camera and then, nodding in agreement with himself, lovingly traces across the lens while thinking to himself “yes, yes this should invoke the desired emotion. To think I almost went with Chipotle-Red… no, no, you save Chipotle-Red for the third act, Snyder.” So with this master’s eye for miserable detail already locked and loaded we get into the business right from the jump, with an opening sequence I think is essential to parse in obnoxious amounts of detail in order to fully understand the breadth of this bizarre vapidity, this seeming contempt for all things:

Our movie about a father who deep down really does love his daughter and the daughter who just needs to learn to let him back in again starts with the holocaust of all car crashes caused directly by a woman whose name in the credits is probably “Whore” giving a blowjob to a man so stupid his name in the credits is probably “Potato.” Everyone is dumb and explodes, and the ones who don’t explode have their faces ripped off, and are therefore also dumb for not having the foresight to die in the explosion, which is at least a cooler and presumably faster way to go. My completely accurate synopsis aside, this insistence on not just kicking off the story with people like these but to render them with such hyper-focused characterization – and this absolutely qualifies as good, lean, efficient characterization – is actually essential in appreciating Snyder’s prerogatives. We could’ve started our film with its initial zombie already slowly making his way towards Vegas, shrouded in pre-dawn darkness, pulling interlopers and romantics and down-on-their-luck gamblers out of frame with the wet squelch of their final gasps and the vile clomp–clomp of violently ravenous jaws, all while the movie offers us no music, no rhythm, guides us only by the uneven footsteps of the walking plague approaching its teeming destination, picking off and creating more fellow plague rats as he goes. Maybe give this zombie a dog-tag tangled around his wrist to show that he’s already escaped the convoy that the audience might be hoping will show up before he hits Vegas. Or we could’ve done the whole convoy thing, but maybe the newlyweds are portrayed as actual humans of some kind, and they are only pushed off the road by the soldiers, nervously and ill-advisedly exiting their car to see what’s going on, and then tragically both witnessing and be made inaugural victims to the zombie takeover of Las Vegas.

But, no. The real focus of Snyder’s – just like his bizarre insistence on showing what a dumb asshole that paratrooper in the credits montage apparently is – is to highlight the complete uselessness of every single character in every possible capacity other than as the kindling they’re going to be used for in the explosion he will inevitably be killing them in. And this vileness is done so lovingly, with such a romantic’s eye for equating life to an overflowing toilet, takes such proud center stage throughout this entire opening sequence, that you can tell that’s where his true heart was at! The soldiers and the newlyweds are portrayed as dipshits with breathtaking efficiency, a level of storytelling skill that is prevalent literally nowhere else in the film, and on the rare occasion it is even attempted fails in the type of metaphorical car crash that puts the opening scene’s literal one to shame. It boggles me! It’s like the only, highly specific form of storytelling Snyder cares about or can even perceive of is one in which you’re downplaying rather than uplifting the lives of the very characters you’re supposed to be shepherding into our affection, if not successfully through the story’s conflict! It’s like he can fart the alphabet but still somehow doesn’t know how to read!

(Oh, hey, here’s another one: what if the two newlyweds were likable in some way, and that one gregarious soldier actually had a moment with them before they died, and his guilt over losing them causes him to also head back into the city for some reason at the same time Ward and his crew go in, and we have a kind of competition of interests between the piratic Ward and the now romantically-chastened soldier, and in the ensuing team-up – oh, fuck it.)

And this weird focus on tearing down the characters before the zombies can even get their clammy hands on them undercuts everything, particularly the things that should be riveting, be right in line with a fun R-rated zombie heist movie, and, most importantly, align perfectly with Snyder’s reputation as a stylish director. Take the movie’s inaugural zombie attack, which happens right after the convoy and the newlyweds tie for first in their game of Moron Chicken: our two doofus drivers stand there and watch as The Man Who Would Be Zombie King tees off on the assembled soldiers, fucking them up royally without much pushback. I’m not going to complain that we’re seeing the monster too soon because this obviously isn’t a “straight” horror movie where you’d typically withhold sight of the baddie until the very end of the first act. But for fuck’s sake, the zombie just stiff-arms a couple of soldiers in a completely flat shot while screaming; nothing is built up to, no tension is achieved or even attempted, no slow revelation of what is this thing, or even a sudden and horrifying reveal of the extent of its powers, timed right when the soldiers are letting their collective guard – to say nothing of their rifles – down and exchanging looks with one another of “guess we were just transporting some guy with bad skin…?” The movie’s first zombie, the vector by which we’d be transported into the movie part of a movie in a, you know, real movie, just kind of runs around screaming at everyone, the mystery or even basic import of the scene almost self-consciously drained away in favor of blowjob jokes and car accidents. It’s like Snyder blew all of his creative juices trying to make the newlyweds and the soldiers as repulsively inhuman as possible and had nothing left – whether it be skill or interest –  to offer when the actual inhuman showed up, instead just shrugging and saying, “I showed you that these characters are pricks and are supposed to die, and then they died; who cares how it happens?” And as we’ll see time and time again, in terms of pretty much every facet of this film’s construction, our director is more fascinated with showing us just how worm-like the worms he’s using as bait are than he is in harrowing us with the size of the incoming fucking fish.

Which brings us back to the opening credits montage. You know, the one where the paratrooper thing happens. I’m not going to parse it frame-by-frame because it’s a whole lot of the same thing, so I’ll just jump to something at the end that caught my eye: remember how I said Snyder’s real focus during the “paratrooper missed his mark and missed it fucking hard” moment was the Vacation Dad-levels of anger with which our flyboy appraises his imminent demise? Well that happens again, right at the end of the sequence whose accompanying track I can’t recall but was probably “Viva Las Vegas” because choosing literally anything else would cause all the knowledge in the universe to suddenly and magnificently blast itself with the forgotten rawness of the Old Gods directly into Zack Snyder’s brain and cause him to be able to see in five dimensions and finally achieve his ultimate form or whatever. Anyway, we see another group of soldiers and another Humvee, and they are, also inexplicably, surrounded by thousands of zombies on all sides. Head-canon, it’s to visually represent the insurmountable task they’re up against, whatever, whatever. The point is shit goes south again, and the apparent squad leader is the last one left. He mounts the Humvee in a desperate attempt to prolong life, which is actually a refreshingly human move to make, and – oh, for fuck’s sake, there’s that angry scowl again! Once more we are not pulled into his conflict and invited to share the horrifying pain and fear he must be going through – or even partake in the gleefully fun sadistic thrill of watching his demise safely, from a distance, outside of his grim fiction, on our comfy side of the movie screen – because he apparently has no conflict to share with us because once again we have a character who seems too dumb to conceive of death as an idea, let alone a mechanical inevitability, and subsequently just seems annoyed that he’s going to have to take one of those open-eyed no-breath-y sleeps that everybody else seems to be taking. No brave face or moment of stoic bravado or desperate invocation of his wife’s name or his husband’s name or his kids’ names or God’s name or his fucking dog’s name. He just looks pissed off, like he hit traffic on the way home from work. And what’s the last thing that he does end up saying, a word that we can clearly read from his lips because the camera deliberately lingers on him long enough to let us see it, much the same way it lingered with gleeful spite on the paratrooper’s descent?

“Motherfuckers!”

You’ll Have to Excuse Me, I’m New to This Planet

In between my moments of explaining away these decisions with “Zack Snyder has deep-seated anger issues that manifest themselves, like a problem child, in self-destructive behavior” are moments in which I think the dude’s brain just doesn’t work right. It’s like he’s never met a person before. It’s George-Lucas-and-the-prequels-levels of unfamiliarity with basic human interaction if George Lucas also had the uncontrollable urge to kill all things, everywhere, ideally with a spoon, to really make things grim and slow and to ruin the concept of spoons for everyone forever. To prove this urbane and understated argument let’s just keep chugging along and hop into the final part of the opening montage, when all the fodder-characters have been killed off and we start to sprinkle in shots of our protagonist characters, who are also just fodder characters but with larger biceps and louder haircuts.

The introduction of the traveling meat-buffets who we will follow from one unconnected plot point and gloriously arbitrary personality metamorphosis (more on that in a minute) to the next until the movie ends with Zack Snyder literally blowing up all of creation with such callousness and boredom at his own inevitability it’s like if Slim Pickens didn’t even bother waving his hat around when he rode the bomb to the ground is, actually, kind of cool. The gross panorama of mayhem that characterizes the first part of the montage slowly gives way to a more focused but also delightfully wordless retelling of what some of our protagonists were doing during the Fall of Las Vegas (spoilers: it was Heroic Things). I will admit my head perked up a little bit from the coma my brain was trying to will itself into when it seemed like something approximating both technical structure and a coherent emotional framework was being crafted from the vistas of many-colored-but-still-somehow-kind-of-gray barf this movie had so far been finger-painting with and probably sneaking the occasional taste of. Hey, maybe the rest of the world is being portrayed as irredeemable to make our heroes nobler in the contrast! Maybe there is a method to this madness, and we’re actually going to get a scene that isn’t designed for the sole purpose of ending in a literal car crash and then we, as an audience, will finally be able to connect to something – nope! My mistake!

Right when it looks like a movie is about to sneak out from under Zack Snyder’s stifling and self-consciously uglifying narrative gaze like a fart wondrously unleashed upon a packed subway car we are hit with another undercutting of whatever the hell this movie is supposed to be about at any given moment, but this latest nose-dive into the Sea of the Grim and the Uncanny is even more inexplicable because it appears to be the result of a sincere effort gone horribly, headache-inducingly wrong. I would even try to write the whole thing off as a joke but that couldn’t possibly be the case because if it was supposed to be a joke Snyder wouldn’t have the restraint to be nearly this subtle and would instead substitute in a more on-brand attempt at humor, like having a redneck wearing a t-shirt that says “AIDS IS FUNNY” call a woman a swear word before stepping on a landmine and blowing his own legs off and rolling around on the ground waving his leg stumps in the air and yelling “they gonna calls me Stumpy from now on! Still think AIDS is funny, though! Tell your friends: Stumpy the Redneck love AIDS!” and then a truck driven by someone in Klan robes and screaming the n-word runs him over or something.

Alright, alright here’s what struck me as so nuts: our heroes are introduced, like I said, doing Hero Things (pulling children from the midst of seemingly imminent zombie-death, helping immigrants file paperwork to get health care, etc.). This is fine and an uncontroversial example of Good Things to Put in Your Movie, especially if you want Likable Protagonists. But then it just gets weird in a way that I honestly am at a loss to chalk up to one particular motivation or another and instead am just attributing to “emotional incompetence.” During some of these Hero Rescue: All Part of the Job, Ma’am moments our protagonists will save someone, notice a bite mark on their arm, and then, their expression barely changing, turn their gun away from the zombies, train it on the person they just saved, and blow them away with a round between the eyes. This is very weird, as public executions are typically not included in montages of heroic behavior! And I know the defense that immediately springs to mind: “it’s done to highlight the grim realities of the job and the absolute chaos of the evacuation and the steely resolve that our heroes must bring to bear in order to save who it is possible to save”! This could be fine, if it – and “it” is murder, remember – was done with something approximating an emotional struggle on behalf of our heroes and filmed in the context of the necessarily complex tones required to highlight the awful reality of, you know, saving someone only to find yourself forced to euthanize them. But in this montage, in the hands of this director, none of that happens – everything is portrayed in these weirdly monolithic and unreflective shifts of behavior, like the characters only exist in the script a sentence at a time – so the above rationale simply can’t fully bail out or even make coherent tonal sense of these moments of cold-blooded killing. Have Ward tearfully implore a man with a bite mark to close his eyes before it happens, maybe, while one of Ward’s compatriots takes the man’s daughter and buries her face in his chest so she can’t watch, and then when it’s over our hero has a faraway look in his eye, seemingly barely cognizant of the next wave of zombies he has to confront, the next civilian he has to put down. Or better yet, don’t have public executions in your silly bang-bang movie! But no, we don’t get anything like that, any awareness of how completely incongruous with our protagonists’ Heroic Introduction this all is, how bizarrely blithe they are about everything.

(One of these instances in particular is lodged in my brain: at one point, our female lead saves a young black guy, notices that he has a bite mark and then, while he is begging her for mercy, just kind of shrugs and shoots him in the head. Does the camera cut tastefully away? do we get a lingering shot of regret on her face? Nope! The camera sits right the fuck there, reveling in the opportunity to show yet another idiot dying yet another idiot death, presented as dumbly as possible to maximize his humiliation for the audience’s, let’s go with “amusement.” For all the lovingly slow pans over characters whose last words are “motherfuckers!” we never get any corresponding camera work over moments when humanity or anything even vaguely relatable to a functioning human might be happening; Snyder films with glee the idiot who dies, not the remorseful woman forced to shoot him. Take note of priorities!).

And, amazingly, we still haven’t got to the part that in the hands of another filmmaker I would think was the punchline to the world’s grimmest setup, the part that makes me think I’m misappraising Zack Snyder’s nihilism when in reality he is just has brain worms or something. See, everything I’ve mentioned so far was only a psychopathic appetizer to the true Shangri-La of Snyder’s crazy. The capstone to the whole affair is this detail, which honestly caused me to turn my head so far to the side in order to make sure I was seeing everything correctly that I rotated completely out of my chair, stood on my head for a moment like the world’s most Jewish break-dancer, and then reseated myself after having completed an entire revolution of incredulity and brain-injury. Here’s the part that broke me: intercut with these moments of our heroes murdering people are shots of them after the conflict, still in their battle fatigues, tragically holding up photos of the fallen, many of whom they have most likely killed themselves! We’re fifteen minutes into a movie whose thesis so far has been “everybody is a dick and I’m glad they’re dying; you know what? fuck the zombies, I hope cancer gets them first” when suddenly we’re hit with shots that are meant to convey the seriousness and somberness of the moment! It’s like the ending of Miami Connection when, after our heroes have murdered everyone with karate and swords, a title card appears and urges humanity to abandon its violent ways. Miami Connection’s complete emotional incongruity had an excuse – they were all on drugs! What’s this movie’s?

And for more evidence that Zack Snyder apparently doesn’t understand how human emotion works let’s go back to the World’s Dumbest Convoy from the movie’s opener. I know we’re backtracking, here, and we’re barely going to make it past the first part of the first act before I have to stop and just stare at the wall for a while until the room stops spinning and I can breathe again, but this moment has been stuck in my brain like skinny jeans on a not-so-skinny man and I need to get it off my chest before my brain completes its transformation into a hunk of gorgonzola and I am rendered useless forever: the two bantering soldiers who were driving point in the Death Convoy, Redundancies Are for Weenies Edition survive the crash, witness all the carnage and madness of the zombie’s escape, and then manage to escape themselves over a dune and into the night. They’re scared shitless and understandably so, as they’ve just watched a ton of people die and apparently monsters are real and one is almost certainly hunting them. Nice opportunity to let the hectic moment work its magic on the audience, let the fear percolate, really let us see these two in their most desperate and human and probably final moments, and make their demise – even if it is a fun, gnarly demise! – something impactful to behold. And then one of them gets freaked out by his own shadow or something (I’m still not entirely sure what happens), hits the ground, and both of them are laughing like drunk college freshmen walking back to their dorm, being all like, “ahaha, total fag move, bro! Afraid of the dark or something? What are you, a queer?” They just forget that a monster is hunting them, and that said monster has killed, like, a lot of people in the past minute-and-change. I feel like I am taking crazy pills, here! Is Snyder that emotionally incoherent, or are these two deliberately being portrayed as that dumb because he can’t kill off any characters without first reminding us, again and again and again, just how useless and undeserving of life everyone is? Remember, these two soldiers just watched all of their friends die and have probably experienced the collapse of their entire understanding of reality in the past, like, ten seconds. And now they’re both silly-bros! I have no idea if “emotional continuity” is a metric by which movies are supposed to be judged – it sounds more like a field that a therapist has to fill out on a psychological assessment form after meeting with a patient being held in solitary because he ate his grandparents or something – but this movie can’t reasonably check that box. Nobody ever exhibits the same emotion in consecutive moments, like the movie is so apathetic about its own events that the actors can only see a green-screen behind them and just have to guess what’s going on in the scene proper from how disconcerting of a grin they can see on Snyder’s face from the director’s chair. 

I Am a Meat Coat, And My Bones Are Its Hanger, or: A Box Full Of Stuff

And this pattern – more of a lifestyle choice, really – can be found growing, like a fungus, in the very foundational aspects of the movie, until we’ve reached a point where apathy hasn’t just seeped into the characterization but the basic structure of the film itself, technical aspects that I didn’t realize a movie could not just whiff on, but apparently not be bothered to care about in the first place. Let’s start with the characters, and how they are portrayed over the course of the story: after the opening montage, and after our elite special forces operative protagonist is reintroduced to us in his new life working as a fry cook because Zack Snyder read somewhere that audiences relate to a down-on-their-luck character (even if his down-on-his-luck-ness makes absolutely no sense), we’re introduced to the crew that will be going into the city together. It’s a heist movie, and the crew in a heist movie pretty much by definition has to be colorful to make it all work, and if this movie’s biggest flaw was following the beats of the genre too closely this review would be one-fifth its size, so I’m not going to complain about stock characters. But the movie either forgets the one trait given to each character or has let its apathy and contempt for storytelling pervade its structure so deeply it just assigns characters arbitrary lines entirely out of spite. We meet a YouTuber character at one point – why an elite soldier would recruit a douchebag from YouTube is never explained, but we’ve got bigger fish to fry – and he behaves exactly as you would expect in the first meeting. He’s an opportunist, a blowhard, a lowlife, seems to fundamentally not understand the danger of going into the city, and basically has “runs away from the group during a moment of crisis only to get his comeuppance a while later” nearly tattooed on his forehead. Got it, sure, movies. But then, at the big group meeting to go over the plan to rob the casino he is suddenly attentive, studious, damn near soldierly in his behavior, treating the two partners that he brings with him – presumably also douchey YouTubers – like trusted fellow warriors. And upon entering the city he is all business, sincerely caring about the only one of his two initial partners who came with him, and advising other members of the group to take the events around them more seriously.

And speaking of his partner, we are explicitly told that she has no experience in combat, so of course a few scenes later she goes full Xena and ruins the shit of dozens of zombies, while also carrying herself like a battle-hardened warrior. I don’t think this is nitpicking. Nitpicking would be more along the lines of “Why aren’t they wearing ear protection when they shoot the guns? Guns are deafening!” This is fundamentally lazy writing. Characters simply exchange personalities on a scene-by-scene basis for apparently no other reason than the production team never checked the character cards that had important details like “YouTuber character – douchebag” written on them. Even our protagonist isn’t exempt from this: Ward takes the offer to rob the casino because he wants a better life for his daughter, or redemption, or some nebulous Hero Motivation that we don’t really notice or care about too much in movies like this. Point is, he’s a solid dude. But when he’s recruiting his first partner – the memorable character of lady whose name I didn’t actually forget because I never learned it in the first place – he gleefully tells her he’s going to lie about what the total pull is – fifty million – so he can keep more money for himself. So he’s a douchebag? But I thought he cared about his team and was driven by Hero Desires and wanted redemption and – oh, fuck it, who cares. Best I can tell is that Snyder saw an opportunity to once again remind you how much he hates people, and if that opportunity involves blowing up whatever paltry characterization Ward was given to start the film then that’s a small price to pay to sicken the audience with deeper levels still of unctuous behavior.

Even the structural parts of the film drip with this bizarre laziness, and like so many things I’ve mentioned before I can’t tell if it’s a sick joke or just Snyder not understanding human emotions at all. Let’s take Ward’s defining tragedy: he loses his wife during the evacuation of the Las Vegas. Damn. Sometimes the simplest motivations are the most impact. But how the moment of her demise unfolds is completely incompetent. As the actually-kind-of-visually-cool-and-efficiently-done-except-for-the-unironic-murder-part sequence is winding down we see that our protagonists have saved everyone they’re going so save and are fighting their way towards the exit. Ward’s wife and the little girl she has in tow are right behind him, that last opening in the freight-container barricade that has been hastily built around the city just a few feet away. Since we know Ward has to lose his wife to give him a tragic backstory we wait for a zombie arm to reach up from an unnoticed crevice, or someone’s boot to get caught, or a necklace that Ward gave his lady before they went into the city to fall to the ground and the little girl foolishly goes back for it, or something. But Ward’s wife, who, and I cannot stress this enough, was right behind him, just kind of stops moving towards the exit, in a weird invisible-rope moment that looks like a scene from an improv-comedy show where the characters are told to pretend they are caught in strong headwinds. The film couldn’t even be bothered to come up with some reason for Ward’s wife and the girl to not make it to the exit so they just stop moving, coming to a halt literally in the opening where the last freight container will be dropped. And Ward? Well, Drew Carey told him that he’s experiencing headwinds from the exact opposite direction (Scenes From a Hat is always a riot) so he’s just kind of stuck in place, too. And then, in a completely flat shot, and I’m taking flat and wide, like Snyder really wanted to put it home for us, the crane operator just drops the last freight container on Ward’s wife and the little girl, and I swear to God all that’s missing is Ward’s wife holding up a sign that says “Yikes!” right before it hits her. And of course a child is murdered as well because did you really think a child wasn’t going to get murdered? I honestly don’t know if this is supposed to be hilariously grim or, like the intercuts of our heroes holding up signs during the earlier part of the montage, another structural detail – characters need motivation! tragic backstories make you sympathetic! – being handled with such apathy that it comes across like something from a junkfood-induced nightmare.

Also, I have to include this one before we go on to the next section (don’t worry, you’re almost done!) because while it doesn’t whiff on the same grandiose scale as the Death by Looney Tunes moment it is just so weird that I have to write about it: when we first meet the zombie queen, when she’s being offered the rapist as a sacrifice, there are of course plenty of things done completely wrong from a filmmaking standpoint: the queen is introduced in a bland close-up without the slightest cleverness in her reveal, the rapist-sacrifice never shuts the fuck up and, like so many characters before him, is apparently too dumb to realize he’s going to die, and so on. But the part that highlights how this movie’s apathy seems to have worked its way down to the basic editing level comes right at the end. After the queen and her goon take the rapist away Ward’s daughter hops on top of an abandoned bus and watches their retreat with a pair of binoculars. Again, a boring, flat shot, too much information given too soon, it demystifies the zombies to just frame them center-stage like that – but, whatever, that’s not what I’m getting at. The part that blows my mind is that the queen zombie looks right at the camera, gives a kind of “you mad, bro?” look, and then turns and runs away into the background for several seconds with the weirdest arm motion I have ever seen. I mean, these zombies are supposed to be horror personified, right? Wouldn’t you maybe cut the lingering shot of the actress running away from the camera, running with a motion so bizarre and clearly uncomfortable that it really seems like she didn’t know she was still being filmed? Just like with characters simply swapping personalities as the movie goes along it’s like no one even noticed any of these weird little editing mistakes – or noticed and just didn’t care.

The Soundtrack

If Zack Snyder wanted a song to play during a scene in his movie where someone chokes on a chicken bone he would somehow, some way find a song from the 70’s called “Oh, No, I’m Choking On A Chicken Bone” and unironically play it in its entirety.

I’m Not Dumb for Not Having Any Answers, You’re Dumb for Asking Questions

The paratrooper scene that I opened this review-screed with is repeated a lot throughout the movie. Not, like, the actual footage – although, please, no one tell Zack Snyder that you can just film one person dying horribly and then loop it indefinitely, that’s how Hitler used to pass the time – but the general idea of logic being entirely subordinated to a voyeuristic delight at death and its elongation for no reason, with “for no reason” being the essential part of the sentence. I think so much of my frustration with this movie comes from my brain’s desire to project some kind of logic, some kind of depth onto the joyless and bizarrely inert funhouse ride that Army prides itself on being – anything that will explain the bone-sure confidence with which each textureless, interminable scene is presented to us. But there really is nothing there, and I’m on pace to spend 8000 words trying to explain how many colors I can see in a black hole. To this end I’m reminded of the scene in which the Super-Cool-Reserved-Guy-With-An-Ulterior-Motive-Until-He-Inexplicably-Turns-Into-Vacation-Dad-Halfway-Through-The-Movie is murdered by a zombie tiger. This is, of course, a scene of comeuppance. He did a bad thing, and now cosmic tiger justice is being doled out. Fine. But just like the first zombie murdering those soldiers in a flat shot, just like the bland-as-hell zombification ritual that I had to cut my commentary of from this review because I’m already bleeding from my eye sockets and can hear the Reaper urging me to follow him to a quieter and more peaceful place, the death scene just goes joylessly on. The tiger tosses its victim around, a lot, and then some more, while the doomed man just grunts and seems equally nonplussed about his impending demise. It’s like a metaphor for Zack Snyder’s entire filmmaking philosophy: settle in on an idea that’s dumbly vicious and then just kind of… point the camera at it for a while. Why does the zombie tiger take so long to kill the guy? why doesn’t the movie just complete the dude’s comeuppance with a quick and morbid wit and let us return to the plot at large? Because killing someone slowly takes longer than killing them quickly, and if you’re looking for an explanation deeper than that you’re asking more from the film than it will ever be able to provide.

The End

Thanks for coming with me, if you did. If you didn’t, that’s cool, too. This kind of became a thing, and it was rude of me to just hoist a thing on you without warning. Even I think it’s too long, and what’s with all those run-on sentences? Thomas Pynchon can make run-on sentences work and, brother, I’m no Pynchon. Anyway, I hope if you did bail on reading this whole thing you’re outside doing something fun, because it’s gorgeous out today. Just a couple more points then I’ll be done:

For what it’s worth I don’t dislike movies just because they aren’t in the Criterion Collection – stay tuned for my Ten Things I Hate About You review! – I just find it so bizarre that someone would spend a hundred million dollars crafting a testament to his own contempt for, near as I can tell, everything that has ever existed or ever will exist, to the very notion of human engagement itself. Because that’s not a pontification on the nature of misery – it’s just directionless spite feeding endlessly into itself. And that’s not to say misery is off limits to storytellers! Storytellers can tell whatever story they want to tell; they don’t owe me anything. But this is a zombie heist movie, so it’s just so damned surreal to have this omnipresent vein of fuck running through the proceedings when I should be yucking it up at clever deaths and general zombie mayhem. I mean, wouldn’t a movie with such a premise almost by definition have some joy in it, some playfulness? Seven Beauties is a movie about misery, and it is a goddamned masterpiece. It also takes place during the Holocaust. The Alex Guinness version of The Ladykillers is all about characters getting offed in darkly humorous ways, and that film is a black-comedy classic. Those two films, fundamentally different though they may be, at least have – among their many fantastic qualities – a human backdrop against which the playfully perverse or the just plain depressing can take place. But you simply can’t make out any difference between the fore, middle and back-grounds of this movie because they’ve all been painted with the same sickly-gray paint. There’s no contrast, no tension between the images or the moments. That’s why I chose to recount the opening sequence in such annoying detail: to stress how crippled the film is from the word go by its own insistence on hating anyone dumb enough to exist in its universe, or dumb enough to watch its universe. This weird spite curdles the drama, farts over the monologues, reminds you how fake the CGI blood looks, causes the jokes to miss and miss hard, reminds you that it doesn’t really matter if any of these people die because they’re all so not just poorly realized but deliberately and spitefully never given realization in the first place that they don’t really have lives to lose, anyway. There is no drama because there’s nothing at stake, and there’s no comedy because there aren’t any people to share the embarrassments with. It’s a house built upon too smugly ironic a foundation to sustain the weight of its underserved confidence. I guess that can be considered a triumph of fatalistic barf-confidence to some people, but to me it doesn’t even qualify as a movie.