To give you an idea of how I felt after seeing this movie, I’m not even sure what genre to call it. There were funny moments, which accounts for most of why I’m not giving it my very bottom rating, but it couldn’t be called a comedy. The plot, set in the present, deals with the aftermath of a nuclear bomb attack, but it doesn’t feel like a sci-fi movie, and clearly it’s not positing a plausible “what if” scenario. The United States is involved in a third world war, and a semi-underground group of “neo-Marxists” is organizing a movement to oppose civil liberties restrictions that include taking over the Internet, but I'm not sure political commentary is what writer-director Richard Kelly was trying to achieve, though for all I know it’s an oblique satire of the Bush administration. The neo-Marxists have a scheme that involves having a policeman (Seann William Scott) impersonated by his twin brother. They’re not too sympathetic, but neither are the people they’re opposing, who include a right-wing presidential hopeful. Meanwhile, the senator’s son-in-law, a well-known actor named Boxer Santaros (Dwayne Johnson) has returned to Los Angeles from near the bomb site with amnesia, taken up with a porn star calling herself Krysta Now (Sarah Michell Gellar), and collaborated with her on a non-porn movie script that is, by all indications, terrible, but probably would have made more sense than the one this was based upon.
Oh, there is more, much more. I’ve not mentioned the kooky scientist who may or may not have invented a new source of cheap energy (Wallace Shawn, resembling a drag queen), or the narrator, a facially scarred Gulf War veteran who intones, reversing T.S. Eliot, that the world will end not with a whimper, but a bang, and recites verses of the biblical Revelations. Maybe the powerful senator is called Frost as an allusion to Robert Frost, whose equally famous poem wonders whether the world would end in fire or ice. Who knows? Obviously, a lot was on Kelly’s mind, but I don’t know what he was trying to say about those things. For ten minutes this movie seemed exhilarating with its mesh of news stories, reported by some Fox News knockoff, offbeat characters, and keen visual sensibility. For another half hour, I was still with Kelly, confident that he was going to tie all these disparate, sometimes humorous, threads into some devastating conclusion in which it would all make sense. It probably does to Kelly, whose previous film, the DVD cult hit Donnie Darko, featured a giant bunny rabbit. Maybe this will have its own cult. But by the end, I was just looking at my watch.
IMDB link
reviewed 11/16/07
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