Hollywood serves not just as an example of one of the single
biggest cinematic forces in our culture, but also a consistent showing that
budget isn’t everything. If you hand a multi-million dollar project to someone
who can’t even be trusted to direct traffic, you can’t expect the 0s in the
bank to cover a lack of artistic vision, style or even just artistry writ
large. Money isn’t everything, and in the world of cult cinema, that law holds
true but in the diametrically opposite direction.
Low-budget filmmaking is in a better place now than it has been at any other time, since access to raw materials needed for cinematic expression are more widely accessible than ever. Hell, most of us have all we need to at least start shooting a film right in our pockets. But again, all that availability isn’t enough to cover up when a person clearly doesn’t know what they’re doing. And with The Room going mainstream as fuck over the last couple years, it seems that that mantle of “filmmaker who has no idea what they’re doing” has been taken by one Neil Breen, someone who has delivered what might be the single most incomprehensible film of the entire year. And it is fucking hilarious!
If you’re able to discern an actual narrative out of any of
the man’s films, well done on managing to overthink cinema even more than I do.
This is no exception. Rather than anything really to do with human duality or
what happens when someone with the drive to right the world’s wrongs has the
absolute power to do so, this serves as basically a clip show of sheer
incompetence. The sets stretch as far as using the same university, complete
with the exact same science lab being reused over and over, and the same
adjacent walkway for the bulk of the film. He may have found enough money to
find working laptops this time around, but that’s only because it’s clear that
they came packaged with the space he managed to rent.
From there, we get facial hair that seems to be a bladed
response to Justice League in trying to find the most distracting effects
possible, replacing conspicuous CGI with highly reflective pieces of sticky
tape. This is only dwarfed by the attempts at Forrest Gump-esque superimposing
of Breen himself onto insane amounts of stock footage, which looks like it was
funded with the equivalent of a fast food binge. Not that his habit of
recycling the same footage lies solely with what he pulls from elsewhere; there’s
a scene with three chain-up businessmen that involves literal copy-and-pasting
of the actors to make the room look more occupied than it actually is. They
also may have survived being shot in the genitals, but the film is edited with
some combination of a blowtorch and a garden mulcher, so it’s not exactly easy
to discern. It even feels like Breen was taking tips from other legendarily
no-budget cult figures in making this, as the numerous explosions shown
throughout look like they were pulled directly from James Nguyen’s Birdemic.
Of course, all of this is just the background for what the
film is really about: Breen and his
raging messiah complex. Every film so far, he has portrayed godly figures who
have superhuman powers that, armed with a vaguely-established skill at computer
hacking, plan to take down the equally-vague corruption and unaccountability of
the government. With how much political corruption has been dominating the
cultural mindset of late, you’d think Breen would stop trying so hard to say so
little compared to pretty much everyone else. Here, while there’s a mild
gimmick of him playing both the Lawful Good and Chaotic Good versions of that
character, it stays true to that framework. The only real difference is the
manifestation of his powers, which goes into two very different yet equally
batshit directions.
Physically, he’s shown to have superhuman agility, able to
leap tall buildings in a single bound. Said bound looks like what happens when
Steve from Blue’s Clues and Puma Man crash-tackle each other in a drunken
stupor. Metaphysically, his ill-explained powers to do with computers,
artificial intelligence and virtual reality are Xeroxed from how the 90’s saw
those technologies, before we had any real idea how any of them worked. You’d
think with us actually having mass-produced VR technology today would clear up
some of that, but Breen don’t wanna hear none of your sense. Nor should he.
Breen thinks that he is a true visionary, someone who is
making art and speaking truth to power in a way that is genuinely important. He’s
egomaniacal, without question, but it’s not the kind of egotism where you’d
worry that the cult of cinematic personality around him is going to result in
the makings of an actual cult. Instead, because he takes everything so
seriously, so untouched by cynicism, and yet is so blatantly filled with bad
decisions, it’s hard not to get swept up in just how baffling this all is.
Say what you will about films like The Room or Birdemic or
even older staples like Plan 9 From Outer Space, they at least have some
semblance of progression to them and a feeling that things are happening in
sequence for a reason. Here? This is easily the worst editing I’ve ever seen,
and combined with the mesmerising lack of production values, the stilted
acting, and the raw bewilderment that is attempting to make sense of what’s
going on in-between, it makes for the kind of film that needs to be seen. With a group of friends, all primed to have a
hearty laugh at a man trying to turn ineptitude into its own form of high art.
And the crazy thing is that, five films in, I think he’s actually done it.
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