Alex Garland’s speculative and apolitical action film might be a box office hit but it’s a frustratingly weightless experience
The music video for MIA’s Born Free imagines a ginger genocide, with humvees of jackbooted, gas-masked stormtroopers raiding a high-rise housing complex to round up redheads. Even before the condemned are bussed out to the desert and used for target practice, the camerawork luxuriates in extreme content – needless collateral brutalization, a slow-mo close-up of a man smoking from a glass stem, a harsh coitus interruptus for a nude couple. All the while, a driving synth loop and kinetic cinematography keep things moving at a brisk, exciting clip befitting the high-energy banger at hand; one of the goons mugs through the fourth wall and lip-syncs a “whoo!” in time with the track.
The video has far more use for the edgy textures of state-sponsored violence than its messy realities, the intellectual engagement topping out at “ethnic cleansing is bad, and who knows, it could happen to you!” At nine minutes, this doesn’t pose such a pressing problem for the director Romain Gavras as it did on his 2022 feature Athena, wherein spectacular formal pyrotechnics gave way to the conclusion that riot police and proletarian protesters have something to learn about getting along. These atrocities may be ghastly, but that’s hardly the point. This stuff makes for cracking footage, every headshot worthy of a post on One Perfect Shot.
