If anyone embodied the bad of the Batch, it was the Bridger credited as Miami Man (Jason Momoa). No, he just invested more into the role than the plot did – reserving the nonsense-as-sense moment for the man behind The Dream. Ribisi brought enough conviction to the role to almost convince me that his insane ramblings were bound to make sense, at some point. Giovanni Ribisi, as the Screamer of The Dream, was an example of that undesirable element. Convincing enough, in fact, to make the character irritating but we weren’t meant to like these characters – they were still a bad batch, after all. Suki Waterhouse brings a convincing degree of aimless determination to her role. It would also set Arlen on a semi-conscious quest for purpose, that begins with wrath, carries through with a sense of responsibility, and ends… I guess I’ll come to a conclusion, later on. Prior knowledge, or not, Arlen’s Bridger initiation was our first real look at just how immersive Ana Lily Amirpour intended to be with her vision. Clearly word had gotten back to wherever, about The Dream but it wasn’t made clear if new arrivals knew about the other faction. Despite the barren visage of whatever the Badlands used to be (Mexico, Texas, a new Dust Bowl in the Midwest?), she seemed happily intent on getting to The Dream. Out of one open end came Arlen (Suki Waterhouse), kicked out of wherever, for whatever, and seemingly not all that nonplussed about it. Its merits, as a story-already-in-progress, is debatable but I just couldn’t ignore the film’s open ends. comparison, is that The Bad Batch had neither backstory nor context to its setting. The problem with the Escape from New York/ L.A.
For the Bridgers, this meant devoting themselves to getting strong enough to literally prey on the weak – and nothing says weak like those devoted to escapism (okay, so maybe apologies to Australia). Much like John Carpenter‘s Snake Plissken series, the condemned of the film made the best of their bad situation, by often enabling their personal worst (when life is a sentence to a prison colony, make Australia). For the residents of The Dream community, this meant devoting themselves to a never ending escapism. At no point, however, does The Bad Batch approach the pretension levels of Southland Tales – I just thought I’d get that out there, for anyone who remembers that thing that happened. Once it began to dabble in the notion that freedom, itself, can be overrated, however, its self-contained nature only made it seem that much more self-indulgent.
0 kommentar(er)
