BEFORE: At this point in the year, putting the chain together is all about choices - I guess maybe all year long, it's all about choices. But when the number of slots left in the year dips below 50, it's really about making some tough ones. Can "Dune: Part Two:" be considered a scary movie? It's got sand-worms in it, like "Beetlejuice Beetlejuice", but maybe that's not enough. OK, so that one's out. What about this one, which connects here, but also connects to another movie from M. Night Shyamalan, "Old", which can't fit in this year's chain, but might be in next year's? There's no way to tell, so do I cut THIS one to go with THAT one, will that it make it easier to watch "Old" or less likely to watch THIS one? I'm erring on the side of watching whatever I can, and hoping that things come together for next year, as they usually do, and I'll somehow have a full slate then, just like now. If I cut this one, then I'm one film short for the year and I'd have to find a replacement, which I don't want to do. So I'll cross this on off and I'm still on target for Christmas. It's not exactly as simple as that, but let's pretend that it is.
Dave Bautista carries over from "Army of the Dead".
THE PLOT: While vacationing, a girl and her parents are taken hostage by armed strangers who demand that the familyl make a choice to avert the apocalypse.
AFTER: Well, I haven't watched a movie from M. Night Shyamalan in a while, not since "Devil", which he wrote and produced but did not direct. Do you know it's been 25 years since "The Sixth Sense" came out? Man, if ever a director got in trouble for just making the kind of films he wanted to make, it's him. Immediately he became famous for that twist ending, then he was known as "the guy with the twist endings", so people approached movies like "Signs" and "The Village" saying, "OK, what's the twist this time" and soon a feeling of aggravation developed, like why get mad at him for having twists? A lot of movies have twists in them, and if a movie just stayed the same and people could predict how it would end from the beginning, then they'd probably get mad at THAT. It's really not fair. Then time goes on and "The Shape of Water" wins Best Picture and "The Lady in the Water" underperforms, and the poor guy probably doesn't know which way is up, like should he do a twist ending now or not, what the hell do people want to see?
This one might keep you guessing, with regards to who these four people are that show up at the lakeside cabin with bad intent. Are they thieves, killers or devout members of some cult? Are they the actual Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, or are they just symbolic of that as a concept? They're not there to kill anyone except maybe themselves, or are they? They seem to be really big fans of suicide, so it seems like they want one of the members of the family staying at the cabin to kill themselves? What would that accomplish?
Well, it's a gay couple with an adopted daughter, I'm not sure if that makes any difference, but perhaps this is based on the absurd notion that some people have, saying that natural disasters are somehow a sign from God that people are living corrupt lifestyles, having gay sex or now I think it's moved on to woke teachers somehow convincing your vulnerable pre-teens to have sex-change operations before they head home from school. Which doesn't make any sense on SO many levels, including the fact that hormone treatments and psych evaulations which would precede any sex-change operations take MONTHS, and fanatical right-wingers seem to think that they can just be scheduled between P.E. class and lunch.
I think it was back around Katrina when the first nutcase suggested that New Orleans was nearly wiped off the map by an angry God who disapproved of the way that some heathens were living their lives, gay people being gay and raising children together and no doubt turning THEM gay, but it didn't stop there. Jerry Falwell blamed the 9/11 attack on pagans, abortionists, feminists, gays and lesbians, so basically everybody he didn't like and therefore projected that God wouldn't like, either. Pat Robertson really started this trend by blaming gay people for an earthquake in California way back in 1994, pretty much ignoring the fact that Los Angeles is on a major fault line, and that really should be enough of an explanation. Then we had several preachers, including those at the Westboro Baptist Church, praising God for sending Superstorm Sandy to NYC as part of his plan to systematically destroy the parts of America that don't follow their God's teachings.
But these four people who come to the cabin are similarly convinced that there is some connection between humans and natural disasters, which also doesn't really track, because the world is so much bigger than humans are, so it seems like it would be more logical that the world could get along fine without us, but I don't know, perhaps there's some weird way in which the Earth might need us as much as we need it? I'm not a scientist, but perhaps in science there is a reason for everything, even if Earth science doesn't really work on those terms. It's really only in the last few decades that people have realized they have an impact on the world, a destructive one due to pollution and plastics in the water and carbon in the atmosphere that is changing the climate. So maybe thinking that people can cause environmental disasters isn't THAT far off, because they're saying now that each tropical storm or hurricane is worse than the last one, and that's on us, probably.
Still, I don't think that people cause earthquakes and mass plane crashes, as seen here, so how could a sacrifice made by one family somehow STOP the chaos and mass destruction going on around the globe on this day? Well, that's really the question of the day, isn't it? Is this just designed to make us think about our impact on the planet, even when it's not very obvious to us? Because it sure seems like this is another anti-gay thing, if one member of the male-male couple kills himself, that would be better for the world? I'm pretty sure that's not what the filmmaker intended to suggest, but still, it's kind of there.
The four cultists who come to the cabin (Four Horsemen, perhaps) were guided there by dreams or visions, and the proof is that Leonard at one point says the same thing as the news reporter on TV, as if he had dreamed it before. Or it was some form of trickery, which is suggested as a possibility, only they sure seem sincere about it, enough to commit suicide for the cause. Well, we've all had those moments in life where we have deja vu, we feel like we've seen the events that just took place before somewhere, perhaps in a dream. I've had dreams that ALMOST came exactly true, like the one about a polar bear costume on "The Masked Singer" - the only thing I got wrong was the identity of the singer inside, but come on, that's everything, so I'm prepared to just chalk it all up to dreaming something random.
So I don't know, this is kind of a big nothing-burger of a movie, but I've seen it now, I can't un-watch it so it still counts, and I separated the 2 films in Zack Snyder's "Army of..." franchise for something that just wasn't really worth it. I hope this doesn't come back to haunt me next October when I can't find a way to connect with that other Shaymalan film, "Old". Well, we'll just have to wait and see.
Also starring Jonathan Groff (last seen in "Idina Menzel: Which Way to the Stage?"), Ben Aldridge, Nikki Amuka-Bird (last seen in "Jupiter Ascending"), Rupert Grint (last seen in "Moonwalkers"), Abby Quinn (last seen in "I'm Thinking of Ending Things"), Kristen Cui, McKenna Kerrigan (last seen in "Aftermath"), Kittson O'Neill (ditto), Ian Merrill Peakes, Denise Nakano, Rose Luardo, Billy Vargus (last seen in "Creed II"), Satomi Hofmann, Kevin Leung, Lee Avant, Odera Adimorah, Kat Murphy, Saria Chen, Clare Louise Frost, M. Night Shyamalan (last seen in "Glass"), Rebecca Newton, William Ragsdale (last seen in "Broken City").
RATING: 5 out of 10 grasshoppers in a jar
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