Huzzah for two-hour trailers! When does the movie start? Oh, that was it, huh? Well, I certainly don’t want to see it again, so can you give me the Cliff’s Notes version of what happened? Thanks.
Whether or not you sleep through Captive State is kind of irrelevant. Aliens took over is all you need to know. When did they take over? About a decade ago. How did they take over? Dunno. What do they want? Dunno. How tolerant are they of human idiocy? Not very. How are they keeping control? With a puppet government. Where do they stay? Underground, in special tunnels excavated especially for our new overlords. What do they look like? Well, the camera was quite shy with our captors, like they all have two bad sides or gout or something, but from a distance they look like big insects. From up close, I want to say they look like Wooly Willy, the bald face game you cover with hair for “fun,” but that’s not quite right. If you get near enough to the walking lint balls, these things are like a 3D electroencephalogram (EEG); they’re all fuzzy until they get agitated and then they get all spiky. How do you kill them? Apparently, a bomb will do it. Personally, I was hoping somebody would figure out that Raid did the trick.
Describing the things or their attributes is useless. Point to this film is we have overlords, we never see them, and the camera follows pockets of resistance without following any given character, central plot, or more than one piece of a coordinated effort. I’m cheating with that last statement, but not a whole lot; Captive State deliberately, inconveniently, and –I believe- detrimentally kept us in the dark about many things for much of the film. This film spends a lot of time following the actions of resistance members without really introducing us to them or even what they’re doing. The film will have scenes in which angry people dole out cyanide caplets for the upcoming thing. Oooooh, great, this is going to be exciting! Wonder what they’re hoping to achieve, or how they’re hoping to achieve it. I’m sure some of these things will be apparent in time, right? Oh rats, trailer mode again. This is like watching an entire movie of the cutaway commercial clock countdown in “24.”
So I see our little movie forgot to have a protagonist. Aw, who needs one of those, anyway? Captive State is like one of those Nazi resistance films, which can be awesome, like The Great Escape, where a central figure doesn’t matter so much as the collective narrative. Here, however, the film is shot in trailer form where an overlying theme is paid homage and a villain is hinted at, but finding details of these items takes a back seat to action and mood music. Among the Witness Protection casting where, believe me, you could hide in plain sight and never be identified, I think I recognized John Goodman and Vera Farmiga, but it’s impossible to say for sure; the cinematography in the film is very dark, like the whole world is constantly at dusk.
One of the big problems with Captive State is that in the effort to mythologize our captors, little is known about who they are and how they managed to conquer the world so easily. It’s hard to rebel against something when you honestly don’t know what you’re rebelling against. And when you have big bugs, you have to show big bugs. Yet for the most part, the bugs do nothing; the evil is set within the human puppets who do the bug bidding. Captive State plays like a Nazi film without Nazis; the villains consist entirely of the French Vichy government while the true evil is never seen.
There’s a style to Captive State; I’m sure it goes over well in, say, music videos. But it doesn’t work on the big screen. For a film that wanted to reflect modern resistance and probably had a thing or two to say about police states and the politics of the present generation, this film failed to bring either protagonist or antagonist to the screen. Doesn’t matter how well shot, cleverly edited, or stylistic your film is if you can’t get an audience to remember it the next day. And that is exactly what Captive State has given us.
Aliens have taken over our nation
Then gone into intense hibernation
Dude, what’s the deal?
Are those guys for real?
Or are they just a figment of defibrillation
Rated PG-13, 109 Minutes
Director: Rupert Wyatt
Writer: Erica Beeney, Rupert Wyatt
Genre: Our screwed future
Type of being most likely to enjoy this film: Trailer editors
Type of being least likely to enjoy this film: People that don’t want to feel like they’ve suffered through two hours of music videos
