Too Much, Too Late, Too Loud (A Kind of Review)

Some Thoughts on ASSASSINATION NATION (2018)

Written and Directed by Sam Levinson
Cinematography by Marcell Rév
Score by Ian Hultquist
Staring Abra, Odessa Young, Suki Waterhouse, and Hari Nef 

Assassination Nation is a film that wants to be Persona meets Sasori meets The Conversation. What is more is that it thinks it's all of these movies. If that sounds either intriguing or a mess to you, the answer is: Yes, yes it is.

Assassination Nation is a style in search of a story. It's a bold, strange movie that wants to tackle a hundred subjects at once and also wants to be 1980's trash horror movie-- and it wants you to take it seriously. Very seriously. It's admirable for its ambition, it is also maddening because none of it works as well as it needs to.

The gravest sin of Assassination Nation commits, style-wise is how over-written it is. I complained a week* or so ago about The Mule and how the big beats of that movie sound like a formula from Final Draft than they sound like people. Assassination Nation has a different, but related problem. The Mule is trying to write plot into peoples' mouths. This movie is trying to write agenda into peoples' mouths. It wants to shout what the point of all of this is and, oh, man, haven't I got you thinking now?

And I'm sitting there watching it, thinking, no, man, you don't. I'm here for the Female Prisoner #701 homage and you have vastly overestimated how much I care what you have to say, bro. And then it just keeps on going about What It All Means and how Current Events are Effecting The Youth. Perhaps if you don't have Twitter this might have some novelty. As a film it feels like a panicked treatise on everything that is wrong with the internet but also a letter on Sam Levinson's keyboard was broken.

The movie pulses with this sort of energy. There is nothing in this film that is at half-dosage. The acting, the direction, the lighting, the set design, the everything, is going as loud and as extreme as it possibly can. Even the quite moments in this film are a panoply of Final Cut editing tools and film school excess. This has some appeal, because at no point does the movie ever become boring. It’s a rocket exploding on the landing pad. Beautiful and loud and probably not what the builders intended.

And on the other hand, the value of Assassination Nation is that it's a sleazy exploitation movie (or a simulacrum of one, a trust fund baby wearing a Sex Pistol t-shirt), is that it's dealing with the regressive nature of the internet and the toxic personalities that it fosters. We're now living in a post-#MeToo world where the president of the United States, a game show host, won an election by convincing your brain-worm infested mee-maw that El Salvadorians were going to break into her house and make her a drug mule. It's wild out there and beyond The Purge and Riverdale there aren't a whole lot of piece of media that are dealing with this issue directly. That itself is a problem, because it also seems like most of the popular media dealing with these stories also seem to be dumber than shit (but I stand to be corrected).

If there is one redeeming quality in the movie, it's that it takes a very dim view of the internet as it stands. As much as we all love videos of capybaras in hot springs, it's also where budding young psychopaths are radicalized into the next school shooter. The internet is an untended garden and Sam Levinson seems to understand this. The internet in Assassination Nation, as in real life, is a platform in which the worst aspects of human nature are allowed to roam freely.

With that said, taking a stand against nihilism is hardly a brave or interesting point of view. Maybe it's a necessary one, but it doesn't feel like something you can hang a movie on-- or at least it's not something you can hang on this movie.

I mean, for a movie with as many Sarah-Connor-in-T2-ass sounding monologues as this movie has, it sure doesn't seem to actually say very much. Now Sarah Connor, there was a woman who had a problem with technology and could tell you what the solution was.

Assassination Nation is never quite lands. It's a film that has a lot going on, but none of it means much of anything. It's a movie that wraps itself around an issue, but ultimately has very little to say about the issue other than it exists (Hey, were you aware that the interent is a cess-pool? Me too!). It's a confused film that isn't entertaining enough to get away with it. It doesn’t seem so much ambitious as it does pretentious. Like the best internet videos, the most spectacular fails are the ones where they really go for it and I can't say that the cast and crew of this movie weren't going for it.

If only for that, Assassination Nation is a film worth watching. Maybe.

  

OTHER THOUGHTS:

• A better version of this "Too much, too now" type of film from 2018 is Sorry to Bother You-- which also happens to be my favorite movie from that year. It's a hell of a ride and, unlike Assassination Nation, all of its extraneous details and asides feel like part of a greater tapestry than stuff Boots Riley wrote into the movie.
• Notably, it objectifies male bodies in a way that I don’t know that I’ve ever seen before in film. Good for them.
• This film stars a trans woman (Hari Nef) and it never goes out of its way to stress that she is trans. She's just one of the girls and that's that. Which is cool and more movies should follow this one's example when it comes to that sort of a thing. Where it gets really cool is that, as much rampant attempted murder as this film features, at no point does feel the need to us the t-word or misgender her-- because this film might be packed with jock douchebags and general-issue psychopaths, but they're not monsters. It's admirable that even a movie that seeks to shock knows that there's a line where it stops being fun.
• This film is directed by Sam Levinson, the son of Barry Levinson, so fuck this guy.
• I can't help but feel-- and I know this is fucked up to say-- that Assassination Nation is the type of movie that Max Landis thinks he's making.
• I was just thinking about Sasori: Female Prisoner #701 and, seriously, just watch that instead and then maybe wash it down with a re-watch of Hackers. Because Sasori and Hackers are ill as fuck. 
• For that matter, also go read Assassin Nation. It's a beaut of a comic. In stores now!

No, seriously, go watch Female Prisoner #701

FOOTNOTES:

* Okay, this took me, like, four months to put out for some reason. Not sure how. Not sure why. But, hey, here we are.

James Kislingbury is a writer, podcaster, and hasn't had any internet death threats lately. Must be losing his touch. You can listen to him here and here. You can shovel piles of lucre at him here and here.