JFL

This delirious look at the menagerie that is human civilisation through the magnificently chaotic lens of Terry Gilliam takes us through the disillusionment of not just the hangover that came with the 1970s. It is permeated by a timeless mix of admiring sympathy for all lunatics and wonderful prototypes, but also by an acknowledgement of the atrociousness of even the most brilliant individuals, who are supposedly elevated to a higher plane by God-given talent or perceptiveness. Fear and Loathing intoxicatingly reflects the generally repulsive world of values, experiences and illusions that humanity has created for itself and for which the hedonistic boil called Las Vegas is not the obverse, but merely a caricature. In this vomit-inducing flashback, the protagonists of Easy Rider appear as their own killers, who sought nirvana and freedom, but because of their own inherent human baseness, they ultimately remain the same monsters and oafs as the bumpkins, weasels, derelicts and bible thumpers who comprises the whole of humanity. Only they can more spectacularly live out their downhill slide into the snare of primitivism and more floridly verbalise it. Most of Gilliam’s films contain the duality of cheerful humanism and misanthropic depression, but Fear and Loathing remains his most controversial and most magnificent work not only in the intensity of the blending of these opposites. Each of its public screenings, always attended by various kinds of people, all of whom see themselves in an unflattering light on the screen, is a 4DX reality check, where some are simply entertained, some indignantly shake their heads and others realise with horror that each of us is just another lunatic in the kingdom of lunatics.

It is necessary to make full use of resources obtained at great cost, even if the result is only some kind of bastardised mutant. This is true for Weyland-Yutani and its real-life equivalent, The Walt Disney Company. The most surprising aspect of Alien: Romulus is its anti-originality. This time around, the Disneyfication of the franchise doesn’t have the feel of a refresh with new characters (as was the case with Star Wars: The Force Awakens), nor does it work as cultish fan-service along the lines of the serial clones from Marvel. Fede Alvarez and Rodo Sayagues wilfully turned out a CGI remix of the Alien franchise’s greatest hits, which lends itself to a game of bingo on the theme of “which cult scene, popular one-liner or iconic shot from the preceding films will be paraphrased in the next scene”. The charm (and uniqueness) of the original Alien tetralogy consists in the fact that it comprises diametrically different and stylishly and supremely distinctive films (I won’t even say anything bad about the fantastically crackpot fourth one. Alien: Romulus is only a derivative, or rather the film equivalent of an Alien-themed ride at Disneyworld – we passively pass by a series of well-known scenes that are impressively yet lifelessly rendered and something occasionally amuses or scares us, but we walk away completely unmoved at the end. Though Prometheus was silly nonsense and elicited exasperation and hatred, it is still better than this precisely crafted definition of the term “content” from the vocabulary of media corporations.

Tony Scott for the first time in full-on experimentally impressionistic mode in a feature-length film. The cinematography and editing, or rather the use of fragments of shots, become the equivalent of massive deposits of paint and brushstrokes. In a nervously agitated way, Scott transforms a gritty thriller into fantastical macho camp whose overwrought images are just as infused with kitsch and surreal artificiality as the peak works by the master of melodrama, Douglas Sirk. On a small monitor, it is a ridiculous spectacle for pubescent boys fumbling about in their masculinity, but on the big screen, Man on Fire is breathtaking as a spectacular audio-visual equivalent of kinetic art. The magnificent experience is framed by a mix of impressions from a unique work that manages to be unintentionally funny in its bleakness, cringy in its kitsch, touching in its pathos and captivating in its formalism.