Captive State
Starring: Ashton Sanders, John Goodman, Vera Farmiga, KiKi Layne, Machine Gun Kelly, Madeline Brewer
Director: Rupert Wyatt
A while back I first saw a trailer for Captive State. A stadium is jam-packed with people waving flags while a slightly... off version of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" is sang. Then a voice comes on the speaker system and says "Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome your legislature," and a BIG DAMN SPACESHIP comes down from the sky. Evocative, right? It's from Rupert Wyatt, directed of the much-better-than-we-all-thought-it-would-be Rise of the Planet of the Apes (encouraging!) and the Marky Mark crime flick The Gambler (less so...). As the months went by and the release drew closer I saw more advertising but... not much detail given. One could take that as a sign that there's not much worthwhile to show. Or one could take the opportunity to see a movie without being inundated with information about it prior to release.
Nine years ago, aliens came and Earth surrendered in the face of their technological superiority. The aliens are never given a species name but referred to as the Legislators by collaborators and derided as “roaches” by the resistance (a fictional slur for aliens it shares with the CW’s Supergirl). There was a resistance but after an unsuccessful bombing that led to the retaliatory destruction of Chicago's Wicker Park neighborhood, they seemed to have died down. Now Gabe (Ashton Sanders) is a poor kid trying to get out of Chicago. He's watched closely by the authorities as his older brother Rafe (Jonathan Majors) was part of that earlier ill-fated bombing. The collaborator government is most represented in the movie by Detective William Mulligan (John Goodman), who spends every waking moment trying to root out the resistance that everyone else says has already been subdued. You can imagine the story beats from there. The resistance plans a big attack on the Legislators under the careful planning of their mysterious leader, Number One. The most compelling scenes are members of the resistance planning this attack, via the use of an organic undetectable explosive that camouflages like a chameleon. We don’t see much of the Legislators themselves. They’re like tall people shaped things covered in spider-like hair (but not with enough spider detail to trigger my rather severe arachnophobia). By and large, humanity doesn’t see them, escape for the Police Commissioner (Kevin Dunn) who briefs them inside their sealed-off section of the city.
The plan was to see this movie with my wife at 7 in Burbank. However my wife works on the West Side and if you know much about Los Angeles you know that traffic out of the west side during rush hour is an absolute nightmare. So since she couldn’t make it, we had a nice dinner and I caught a later show at 10. She opted not to join me as she works in the morning. All this is to say that she won the evening because she did not have to sit through Captive State. What a dull slog of a movie. The main character is played by Ashton Sanders from Moonlight and a small role is played by Kiki Layne from If Beale Street Could Talk. This made me wonder: is Rupert Wyatt a fan of Barry Jenkins? One could not blame him, but how do you watch those beautiful movies and churn out this dreck? How do you gaze upon the gorgeous cinematography of those films and excrete this shaky-cam barely-lit ugliness? The story isn’t much better. If literally everything you know about this movie is from this article, then you can guess the identity of Number One and their master plan that this movie is clearly so proud of in its final moments (especially if you’ve seen certain other movies that have similar “twists”). The cast for the most part does… fine. They don’t have much to work with but, with one exception, they aren’t bad. The exception is Jonathan Majors as Rafe. He actually doesn’t talk in a lot of his scenes and he’s not bad at the wordless stuff, but in his big talking scene… yikes. Then again, with the material he has to work with I am not holding it against him going forward (and I am looking forward to Lovecraft Country).
It's a rare movie that has virtually nothing to offer. I find myself thinking about all the ways this could have been better. The reactionary right wing of the internet (at least as I’ve witnessed on Facebook) is decrying this movie sight unseen as leftist crap. They’re right about the crap part but this movie doesn’t have anything to say, leftist or otherwise. What if it did? What if sci fi was being used to illuminate a point, like a Neil Blomkamp movie. The aliens are using earth’s resources for their own ends and there’s a stray line of dialogue about how they’re using the planet up. There’s a movie there! Or go more in the Paul Verhoeven action satire route and have the aliens represent an out-of-touch ruling class completely disconnected from the planet they’re trying to rule. Or even look to the Italian neorealist movement and make something like Rome, Open City but with aliens. That would certainly be sacrificing the “real” part of neorealism but who cares? JUST TRY SOMETHING. It would have been better than this whole lot of nothing.
F