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Captive state is a dark political allegory, dark, low (ish) -budget, science fiction that dares to ask the question "And if District 9 and They live were the same movie – and the two took themselves far too seriously? Directed by Rupert Wyatt (Climb of the Planet of the Apes) He draws impressive visuals from a tiny budget and enthusiastically plunges into big fleshy ideas about clbad, geopolitics and war, but fails to engage emotionally; mainly through a scenario that is more dedicated to moving parts for a plot scenario unnecessarily complicated (and too easy to understand too early) rather than allowing us to fully connect with one of our star players or their world.
In eight years from tomorrow, after the invasion, the conquest and the actual colonization of the Earth by a technically superior extraterrestrial race, identified only by "legislators", history will limit the essential from his field of action to cat and mouse fights between human police and government officials. collaborating with the alien occupiers and insurgent resistance fighters who are trying to destroy the system in the walled city of Chicago. This narrow approach maintains a manageable budget margin, but it also allows on-screen events to more directly present what is obviously intended. "Think about it, do not you?" visual parallels with the real-life scenarios of the last years between military and insurgents, aimed at reaching Western and specifically American audiences "How would you like it ???" soft-spot – which quickly became the main goal here.
The story centers on Chicago, as it is home to one of the major gateways to underground cities where lawmakers are working to strip the planet of its natural resources. Ashton Sanders (Moonlight) And John Goodman are ostensibly our main characters; respectively play with a clever young scammer who fights to get himself out of the city permanently (to end up being dragged into the machinations of an anti-legislator resistance cell that worships his dead brother as a heroic martyr) and a world A tired police investigator who sees his mission of thwarting the so-called "terrorists" not as a collaboration but as anything he can do to prevent lawmakers from simply leveling the city he once inhabited.
Because it's "this kind of movie", the two men share a link that you'll probably guess well before it's established and probably even sooner than you'll pick the heavily loaded trigger switches that have been carefully set up to create stifling strength – a clear reversal of act 3 occurs; But to be honest, Sanders and Goodman are both great actors and so good here that if they were allowed to play their dynamic throughout the film, the general familiarity with the story would not be as problematic. The problem, on the contrary, is that we did not quickly sell the tone and the texture of this morally gray story in two titles and two protagonists that Captive state decide to sideline them for most of its median section.
It's a really weird structural decision; a film that looks a lot like the movie must have been too long at a given moment and it's the best way for them to reach a reasonable length of time: Having spent almost all its introductory scenes establishing the film world and its rules through the movements of two characters, the film abandons both of them for a detailed sequence detailing the elaborate series of controls, codes, hacks and procedures allowing the network of minor and / or novel characters constituting the "resistance" of gather, plan and execute a series of checks. a daring insurgent act against the wicked that the character of Goodman barely participates in until it comes to the very end and that Sanders is not present at all.
The sequence itself is the film's technical badet: a mechanism of brave introductions, seemingly random minor visual cues, and tactics of actors that effectively communicate what's happening with only a hint of data. This is without a doubt one of the clearest illustrations of "it's how an effective insurgent campaign works", I remember seeing filming, science fiction tinted or not – and as that short film in its own right is really something; but in the context of it, it's basically mechanical and distancing, because we do not know these people, or really why we should be concerned beyond their individual actors who are reasonably convincing.
In fact, we feel so separated that instead of ending with the expected close confrontation with The Legislators (to whom we have no really never seen much, but for what we see, they are a bit like Venom was a porcupine), they find themselves facing different armored extraterrestrials, more conventional, of the type "Predator-esque" which are called for reinforcements that we also never see again. And then it's over and we went back to the "real" movie for a "no, it was not the plan – this it was the plan! ". To finish is not as cleverly disguised as he thinks.
Frustration, I really wanted to love that more than I liked it. Honestly, it's been so right in the elements I'm really trying to give a pbad because you want to encourage established studios to let experienced filmmakers make exciting mid-budget projects around big ideas, taken seriously, staged with good actors and realized with real conviction and something to say. Indeed, even in 2019, a Hollywood studio has the courage to stage a film where the open and obvious point is "Hey, maybe try to see things from the perspective of the insurgent" (little does not matter what you think of the point itself.) But running issues, and too much Captive state ends up feeling like a homework.
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