The next film from modern master Neil Breen is an altogether more ambitious film than his debut Double Down. Whereas in Double Down Breen played an all-purpose lone hacker agent full of torment and questioning, used by shadowy organizations for often dubious purposes, here he plays God. Literally. If he's playing God then he'd better have something substantial to live up to that lofty title.
Neil Breen plays an alien planet/species maker who lands on Earth to check up on his creation to see how it's doing. Not so well it turns out as people are knocking people with cancer in wheelchairs over, killing and torturing, and getting high in car boots on hard drugs in the middle of the desert for some reason. Also, politicians are taking pay-offs from gangsters and stopping progress in solar energy research because they're only in it for the money, as they bluntly explain to each other and us. So...Lord Breenus (he's never given a name as I recall) steps in to intervene and make things right, by temporarily killing two people who are taking drugs and firing off guns and being unconvincingly wild and crazy on the boot of a car, making the eyes of a man who pushes a guy in a wheelchair over bleed until he runs off crying, and crucifying all the corrupt politicians and businessmen in the desert, before making a Klaatu-style speech warning us that if we do not change our ways he will destroy us, hoping that the lessons he's taught to a small number of people in Las Vegas will resonate with the rest of humanity. All powerful alien space gods rely heavily on publicity. Those saved people have a lot of work to do if they're to stop humanity from being wiped out. It crosses my mind that Breenus may have doomed them to extended stays in a mental institution, but I have faith that Breenus knows what he's doing.
I don't know what to think of the film because whereas Double Down was morally grey, this film goes straight for black and white morality. Or at least Breenus does. I'm not sure if it's reaching or not to say that the film is symbolic, that the crucifixion of corrupt, greedy, money-grabbing politicians is a metaphor for the cancellation of excuses and second-guessing, where money is a symbol for directing blame and moral culpability through a proxy in order to keep hands clean and preserve vanity. Certainly the film seems completely sincere in it's declarations, even though the stark, blunt look of it suggests something more symbolic. For instance all the gangsters and corrupt politicians and businessmen in Las Vegas have one single place in which they meet up, and for some reason it's a ruined, broken down old building that looks like it's been bombed. Unsurprisingly one of them turns out to be a snitch because any group of people meeting at that place would seem instantly suspicious. They all address each other as either gangsters or corrupt politicians who are after money. It's so completely blunt and explanatory, so there's no mistaking who the bad guys are. Interestingly there are characters who are not clear cut good or bad, like a couple who have both lost their admirable, decent jobs, sharing a joint on a park bench, with each toke coming closer to the conclusion that they need to go into a life of crime and lie to each other. The film seems to be suggesting that corruption and egoistic self-serving preys on the weakened and desperate like a parasite, which is true. By smoking pot and temporarily clouding their cognitive decision making skills the couple find themselves together again with the gangsters who kill the guy and leave the woman alive out of some unnecessary and unwarranted demand for respect.
In the end Breen's interventions, from curing the wheelchair man of cancer and making him twenty years younger, to resurrecting the drugged couple and telling them to contribute and do good, leave us wondering where we're going wrong and what to do now? I don't love this film like Double Down, instead I feel divided. On one hand, the black and white morality and Lord Breenus' police-state attitude to human progress makes me recall the same ideas of Klaatu in The Day The Earth Stood Still, and if the film is to be taken literally I do not agree. It certainly is an interesting and enjoyable film, more chilled than Double Down, very ambient and ethereal. Next up Fateful Findings.
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