Films like this make me kinda nervous as far as writing what I actually think about them. Yeah, there’s my previously-mentioned insecurity when it comes to discussing stories and ideas connected to Black cultures, which I genuinely think I’ve dropped the ball on around here a number of times, but there’s also the historical side of things as well. Long before this film saw release over here in Australia, it came under heavy controversy for its historical inaccuracies, to the extent that it airbrushed the involvement of Dahomey, the West African nation that the film is centred on, in the Atlantic slave trade.
Now, whenever dealing with films based on historical events, I tend to lean on the side of “this is a film, not a documentary” when processing what’s on-screen. I often feel like I’m stretching my abilities when talking cinema as is (hello imposter syndrome, my old friend), let alone feigning knowledge about history that I do not possess, outside of some light Googling out of sheer curiosity; this should not be mistaken for a lengthy education on such things. Between that and the regularity with which cinema, particularly in the mainstream, glosses over the messier parts of the subject matter, I don’t feel comfortable judging it on those standards. I especially don’t like the idea of a film like this being put under some ‘model minority’ scrutiny bollocks, where it’s expected to do better than those whose diversions tend to fly under the radar more times than not.
So, what I’m going to do with this film is to discuss it and analyse it as is. While I have done a bit of looking-into concerning the real-world history being shown (and yes, it is a lot to deal with), I am only going to be talking about what is in the film itself. Partly because of my aforementioned reluctance about judging films on anything greater than that, but also because I’m hoping to surprise at least one reader as far as what is actually in the film that everyone and their dog(whistle) is talking about.
Y’know, at the fourth film in, I was honestly expecting the bottom to drop out of this series. Even with how well the After films have been doing at getting increasingly worse, yet increasingly more fun to watch, with each instalment, I thought it would get to a point where the melodrama couldn’t be pushed any harder and we’d start seeing diminishing returns. I mean, even with film series I like for reasons beyond laughing at their expense, it’s rare to see one last this long and still maintain that key engagement factor. And for a little while, it indeed looked like this was where things would start petering out. But then it decided to floor it into a brick wall and further the series trajectory to unleash what is, somehow, the new worst and new funniest entry in the series.
What a curious little series this has turned into. The first film is still a garbage fire behind a gasoline refinery, but past that point, these films have basically turned into everything I wanted out of the Fifty Shades series: Silly, phenomenally stupid, but almost endearing in their asininity and willingness to entertain on those terms. And as the third of a proposed four (possibly five) film series, After We Fell is more of the same unhealthy junk food that came before, only it’s lacking in even the most basic of narrative fibre by this point.
