I was at first convinced that "Captive State" was based on a young adult sci-fi novel in the vein of "The Hunger Games" or "Divergent." All the signs were there from the trailers: a post-apocalypse story starring a young cast being used as a metaphor for unsubtle social commentary. Apparently it isn't, however, being an original screenplay from director Rupert Wyatt and Erica Beeney. Well, with that invigorating thought of a presumed passion project looking like a generic action movie from six years ago, what could possibly go wrong?
The film takes place a few decades into the future. An alien race calling themselves the Legislators have taken over the world and walled off certain major cities across the globe. One of the cities is Chicago, where most of the film takes place. Gabriel Drummond (Ashton Sanders) is a street-wise punk intent on leaving the walled-off city. William Mulligan (John Goodman) is a police detective trying to sniff out an underground resistance against the Legislators. Their paths cross when Gabriel's supposedly dead brother (Jonathan Majors) turns up alive and part of the resistance. Unfortunately, this is where the film stops being comprehensive.
The movie has almost no structure to it. The first act is mostly good, setting up the characters and their world. It's not interesting and a lot of what we assumed had happened years ago is treated like it's new for the sake of verbal exposition. But at least it's easy to follow. After that, however, the plot kind of loses itself. There are no recognizable beats taking us from the beginning to the middle or the middle to the end. Instead, the film completely switches focus from what we assumed were our two main characters to a plan by the resistance to bomb a Legislator ship. It's an hour-long heist movie that never stops feeling like an intrusive interlude. And if the film has a climax, it completely slips past because there's no difference between it and the dozens of other bland action scenes the movie goes through. There's no highs or lows in terms of the film's energy; it's just a plateau of meaningless action.
This energy disfunction really shows in the film's editing, which is constantly on the move. You know how in a lot of movies there will be a pause at the end of a scene to let the audience drink in the consequences of what they just saw? Well, "Captive State" took this basic filmmaking wisdom, utilized over the past century of the medium, and tossed it away. Almost every scene ends as soon as the last line is spoken. The audience is never given time to think about what just happened or what it could mean for future scenes. If I had to guess, I would say that the filmmakers were afraid of the audience becoming impatient.
The editing goes from annoyance to hindrance when combined with the cinematography and blocking. The camera constantly shakes like the cameraman watched "Children of Men," with its uneven camera movement that emphasizes the unease of the characters, and thought "Hey, I can do that, only more chaotic!" And the blocking is a good example of why it's one of the most underappreciated aspects of the medium. The environment is never fully established or mapped out for the audience, so you find yourself constantly confused when a character goes through a door you had no idea was even in the scene. And then the editor decides we didn't need to see how that character got there, so we just see the character going through the door.
And if it wasn't bad enough that the film is technically messy and thematically incomprehensible, it's not even fun on a primal level. It's so determined to be self-serious and suffocatingly pretentious that it forgets to be exciting or give us a reason to root for the main characters. The designs for the aliens severely disappoint, but that's nothing new in today's Hollywood. Monster designs have gone stale in the past decade, so if you're expecting the next xenomorph you clearly don't pay close attention to patterns.
"Captive State" is like a badly constructed college essay. It wants to talk about important things, but is unable to being comprehensive about any of them. It just rambles on about totalitarianism, minority poverty, insurgency and media propaganda without once trying to make a point. There's no flow to its plot, nothing new in its message and nothing fun on a purely surface level. At this point, we're just killing time until "Us" comes out next week.
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