Owned release: The 2007 DVD from Heretic Films, the arm of now-defunct boutique label Subversive Cinema established to release micro-indie projects.
Acquired: Sent to me, unsolicited, by the label's publicist shortly before its commercial release.
Seen before?: Once from this disc on March 1st, 2010. Wrote about it here.
This is where I came in...
I didn't much like this novelty-driven gewgaw when I first saw it, but I at least appreciated the spirit in which it was made and commended the effort. Upon a second glance, it was generous to grant even that - this is very much a standing-dog type of movie, where the fact of its existence, especially at this budgetary level, is meant to be attraction enough. Which, sure. I'm proud of the people who made this for achieving what they did given their resources. But, like Bwana Devil or Mr. Payback before it, a film is more than the fact of its existence; at some point, someone is going to be expected to sit through the blasted thing, and all the goodwill towards an innovative production evaporates pretty quickly if said innovation stops at the method of production.
But I'll leave aside the plot and acting and all that for the time, especially since any critique of the story boils down to, "Uh, you made Citizen Kane. We already have a perfectly good Citizen Kane." If this film is being sold on the strength of its innovation, then I'll meet it there. Able Edwards, certified as the first film shot entirely in front of a greenscreen - no sets, no locations, just actors and whatever is programmed into the FX monitor behind them - isn't very good even when judged on that achievement alone because said greenscreen work is unconvincing at all times. The images - mostly large warehouses, boardrooms and other such empty cavernous spaces - are washed-out and fuzzy, especially when contrasted with the flesh-and-blood people standing in front of them; this contrast is only magnified when the backdrop has to do something more elaborate, like the heavily-attended courtroom/arena that provides the setting for the framing device or the amusement park that the title character builds in an effort to provide something different to the VR-addled future society he's been brought into. In an effort to hide as much of the fuzzy backdrop as possible, the majority of shots are framed tightly, with lots of close-up headshots and crowded group compositions. The effect is not unlike watching a cut scene from the Sega CD game Night Trap, with its ugly compositing and cruddy digital effects, except the cut scene last ninety minutes instead of ninety seconds.
I can allow that this is all due to monetary limitations, of course. But there's something I didn't know when I first wrote about this. In my previous review, I dinged the acting as stilted. Turns out, I can't really blame the actors - the camera was in a fixed position the entire time, and the actors had a rough six-foot radius in which to act. Thus, the rigid postures and non-demonstrative performances, the inability for anyone to meet anyone else's eyeline, the incredible disorientation when anyone has to do an action that does require movement. (Even a simple scene of several people walking down a hall results in a cocked eyebrow, since the actors are clearly walking in place.) Which begs the question, should something of this scope have even been attempted at this budget level? Was it a worthwhile pursuit? If the point is to save money on sets, but in doing so you construct a wholly unbelievable world, and you have no imagination left with which to fill it, what have you actually done?
The hell of it is that Able Edwards is aware of its limitations - painfully, openly aware. It's the whole damned, self-defeating point of the narrative: a Walt Disney-esque character driven to provide a dose of reality to a populace too enamored of weightless simulacra, rendered entirely in weightless simulacra. As he goes from the boardroom to the amusement park to the campaign trail to late-life post-tragedy isolation, most everything that comes from his mouth is about the value of reality - "It's time we made something real" is his watchword - yet his surroundings are at all times the cheapest, fakest approximations of his constructed "reality" experience. It's a cognitive dissonance that undoubtedly is meant to be productive and ultimately poignant, given the tragic bent of the narrative, but this time around I found it tiresome and insistent, like a stoned college roommate who won't stop going on about how he really can see the truth of the world now, man, no really, like REALLY sees it. Able has a breakdown early on in the film, which leads to a freak-out in a sanitarium. As he's shrieking "IT ISN'T REAL, IT ISN'T REAL!" at the holodeck showing him pleasant images of a garden, he hammers the glass of the monitors until they crack and shatter, revealing the computer circuitry underneath. The monitors and cracking glass and inner circuitry, of course, are greenscreen images. The irony is piled high enough that I can stand up and say, "Yep, message received, thanks"... and then there's still another hour left in the film. I can only watch the same card trick for so long, sorry.
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