Look, I need something lighter after the last film. Something short, something funny, something weird, and hopefully, something not as heavy as Martin Scorsese calling out genocide. So I decided to check this out mainly because of its oddball title, oddball poster, and oddball premise of a team of French superheroes named Benzene, Methanol, Nicotine, Mercury, and Ammonia, otherwise known as the Tobacco Force.
Where it gets weirder is that the central idea of this film (I think?) is indicative of why I decided to watch it in the first place.
Okay, so I say that this is about the Tobacco Force, but this isn’t really a superhero movie. I mean, it has superhero action in it, starting out with a young boy overlooking them fighting a rubber turtle monster in a rock quarry, but the majority of the film has… nothing much to do with them specifically? Instead, it’s closer to Tales From The Crypt than Power Rangers (crossed with a bit of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles with Tobacco Force’s mentor being a talking rat), with our team spending time at a team bonding seminar and telling stories to each other.
The stories are some of the most batshit yarns I’ve had the pleasure of witnessing in years, and to really get into the details of what makes them so insane would end up spoiling the magic that is watching them in real time, seeing them gradually turn into absolute nonsense, and then stare mouth agape as things get even weirder. What begins with two couples having lunch together turns into a lo-fi Black Mirror slasher, and what start as an unfortunate workplace accident turns into a strangely touching bond between a woman and a talking bucket like this is a Stanley Parable movie.
There’s a certain cascading effect to the oddity of this film, at least for me. I spent quite a bit of it going screwfaced, trying to figure out what in the actual shitfuck I was watching, but once I started taking stock of the actuality of what I was looking at, I found myself crying with laughter. There are few things that bring me more joy with watching movies than when the simple act of describing what is literally happening on-screen makes me sound like a crazy person, even if I’m just saying it back to myself.
But what about that central idea I brought up earlier? Well, let’s look at the components of the story. We have a group of superheroes getting together to chat and tell stories, where said stories are about mundane people in mundane circumstances that eventually turn into absurdity. High-concept leading into simplicity, and simplicity leading into high-concept. ‘Disconnect’ might as well be the defining word for this whole thing, and highlighting it seems to be the main point.
It feels like a direct piss-take of the nature of character work in more out-there sci-fi and fantasy stories, where you’ve got impossible people in impossible places doing impossible things… and yet, the most interesting stuff happens when they’re just talking about mundane things that the audience can relate to. Like how Power Rangers involves a team of martial artist against witches and evil robots, but the show spends quite a bit of time dealing in teenaged melodrama and social issues of the day.
It flies in the face of escapism as a concept, where the
media you’re engaging with as a reprieve from the real world and its recurring
nonsense is often at its most effective when it’s directly comparable to the
very thing you’re trying to get away from. SF is entirely my wheelhouse, and I
love the inherent freedom offered by being able to tell stories that aren’t
bound to the laws of reality… but the reason why I like shows like Doctor Who
or Star Trek: DS9 or even Power Rangers, to a sizeable extent, is down to how
much I can understand the characters and what they’re going through. Not the
fact that they can take place on worlds, amongst civilisations beyond what I
could realistically experience for myself, but because I recognise them from
experiences I have gone through.
So is it escapism or isn’t it? Do we engage with stories because we need a break from reality, or just because we need a filter through which we can come to terms with it? If it’s the latter, then surely, we’re all just missing the point of the exercise. It’s like someone powered by the harmful ingredients in cigarettes, on a break from using those powers to save the world, telling a kid not to smoke, but not because it could lead to disease and even death, but because it causes coughing.
This film clocks in at under 80 minutes, and yet there is a lot going on. It’s an extremely French comedy that deconstructs its nostalgic American influences, offers all manner of truly unforgettable scene-by-scene moments, and serves as a surprisingly thoughtful and poignant look at why we would choose to watch stuff like this in the first place, if the main thing we latch onto is something we can encounter away from media that’s this high-concept. It’s the kind of film where the immediate effect on its own is enough to sell its worth as entertainment, containing some of the best practical effects gore I’ve ever covered on here… and quite frankly, I doubt anything could top this going forward, but for those who have an obsessive need to break down the media they consume for some deeper meaning (who am I to judge?), there’s plenty to chew on here.
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