directed by:
Brady Nelson written by: Brady Nelson genre: Thriller |
A political thriller, you say! Why aren’t there more of these? I’d probably watch’em all. Though I will admit, my appetite for politics has vastly diminished since we all became force-fed by BIG POLITICS and bombarded with it daily, as opposed to back when I was taking a course in Political Science and having the option as to how much of it I would consume. In today’s world, we’re dealing with all the things we hate, like, or love + politics – because that’s how pervasive it’s become in everything that we do.
There’s always going to be someone out there who pops up on your posts and decides to make things political, there’s ‘both sides’ of the story on everything we click on, and there’s the ‘I’m just asking questions crowd’ (please don’t get me started on them), and a combination of misinformation & its more savage cousin, disinformation, everywhere that we turn our heads and click. “Outrage” is a film designed to reveal a lot of how this works and certainly digs deep into the psychological aspect of what makes us click things online and, perhaps more importantly, why someone wants that to happen. With a dastardly goal of actually affecting the outcome of a democratic election, Paul finds himself entrenched in a world that takes place behind the Wizard of Oz’s curtain; only it’s far less colourful than you’d have thought. It’s nearly all online, no music, and there are definitely no rainbows. Okay, okay - it’s basically another lifeless office space where they don’t let any sunlight in, just like you thought it would be. You’ll also find a roomful of highly cheerful personalities who are obviously very happy with the chaos they’re creating. I’m kidding about that too – they’re outright miserable, and any time that you can hear someone talking, that’s time these hired goons could be clicking on something and creating more online mayhem. Paul is caught in a web where he’s trying to sort it out, while at the same time trying to navigate a whole bunch of nefarious conglomerates that would easily kill him if they caught wind of what he was really up to. While the place that Paul’s working at is doing its level best to assassinate the career/political aspirations of Governor Newbaum, his rival, known as Trellit, is spewing out a litany of falsehoods and controversial statements like it’s his sole purpose in life. If what he says ends up sounding awfully familiar to you – emphasis on the awful – I can guarantee ya that’s not merely a coincidence. Trellit is very Trump-like. Now ask yourself, based on the luxury of hindsight as we float here in the ether of the aftermath – if you could have done something to prevent his rise to power back before it had happened, would you have done it? With how angry, disconnected, and hateful the world has become as a result, I like to think most of us would have done something if we had the foresight to know just how bad it would all get. Rather than laugh guys like Trellit off as the clowns they are, we’d take them more seriously…and if we could go back in time and be like Paul, I like to think that we would. Paul runs dangerously close to outing himself along the way with all of his questions. The ‘conductor’ as he’s known…the guy that’s basically playing Ben Affleck’s role in “Boiler Room” here in a political setting, is fun…he’s not driven by a moral compass like the rest of us tend to be. Listening to his analogy of how we decided to eat eggs and bacon for breakfast is truly something else. He’s essentially offering Paul the opportunity to help shape reality as we know it – to be a salesman of reality, in a way – which is…again, pretty much awful in my personal opinion, but I had to admit that so much of what the ‘conductor’ was talking about was objectively true. Doesn’t make it any more palatable, but it still seems accurate. The only thing that I had questions about with regard to the ‘conductor’ is that he’s clearly intelligent, and you’d think his alarm bells would be ringing loud and clear about there being a mole in the room. Yet, for some reason, even with all his obvious plant-like questions, Paul seems to remain under the radar. We come to know the ‘conductor’ of this chaos orchestra as Bryan Macelvoy as Paul continues to dig.
“We feed them stories, we don’t eat them.” I love this line! 100% – it’s as insightful as it is true in today’s world, where attention itself has become the most valuable commodity we have. It also highlights where the breakdown in communication is right now as well – that statement proves that we talk and talk, but so rarely listen. “Outrage” also goes on to explain how crucial it is to be the first story out there – good or bad, it doesn’t matter – if you’re the first to say something, the endless echo chambers we’ve created take care of the rest, and that story, true or false, goes on to live forever. “Outrage” examines what it means to do your job, versus doing what is right…or what we perceive to be right. I enjoy the quandary it presents and how it attempts to blur the lines between what we should regard as fact or as fiction – and perhaps even more fun, is how we’re led to believe that the real truth might not even matter at all. So…don’t get me wrong – I, as an individual, am certainly interested in Writer/Director Brady Nelson’s story here…and I’m reasonably confident that I won’t be alone in feeling that way. Where he’s put up a very large barrier between his film and the potential masses, is that it’s still a handful of people in a cubicle - and I hate to be the one to break the news here, but no amount of intense background music is going to make that any more enticing to your average viewer. The sheer amount of text you’ll see onscreen is also going to prove to be tough for most to follow based on how it moves, and there’s enough of it in “Outrage” that it’s almost a case of reading a book onscreen. Believe me when I tell ya, as a guy who worked at a video store for more than a decade, making the public read subtitles or text messages instead of showing them what they’re reading about will lose about 90% of the potential audience. I barely ever worked a night where someone didn’t want to throw a DVD at me behind the counter for the deadly sin of a movie trying to tell them something as opposed to showing them instead. A little bit is alright – a lot of it basically enrages most viewers and is tough for any film to overcome in the court of public opinion. To like, or to enjoy “Outrage,” is to accept you’re going to do a lot of reading. Even I struggled with this at points. I have no real objections to reading a lot of what I’m watching on a personal level, but there is so much text onscreen that it wasn’t always easy to know where to look. I also like movies that are largely based in one room – so a film like “Outrage” is practically designed for me specifically as a movie - but, I recognize how problematic this would be in reaching a mainstream audience. Basically, when you’re as smart as Nelson clearly is, it’s hard to not let that be the dominating instinct. You wanna make a smart movie and probably even have an ambitious desire to help the rest of us evolve, but it’s hard to do that when you’re coming at the public from way beyond what they can grasp on an intellectual level and not giving them enough visuals to help them out. Trust me – if they really wanted to read a book, they would. The premise is excellent, the acting is solid, and the script is stellar. The approach is gonna be polarizing, but I have to believe that someone as smart as Nelson would have known “Outrage” can’t reach everyone. It gets mired in smaller details while trying to make a larger point, but it still absolutely appeals to me. I’m definitely willing to give “Outrage” three and a half stars out of five, from my own perspective and what I personally like – but I’d readily acknowledge this is gonna be tougher for most folks to make sense of. For a film based on disinformation, that seems like the way it should be, shouldn’t it? |
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