Sol Invictus |
  • USA • 2012 • 106m •   • Directed by: Ben Carland. • Starring: Jake White, Jake Brown, Colin Conners, Caleb Courtney, Sky King, Aaron Kuban, Spenser Pollard, Tyler Thomas. • Music by: Alex Davis.   Set in the distant future on a hostile alien planet, a group of ambitious young adults embark upon the prestigious Sol Invictus competition in a quest to win fame and glory.
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Review:
This movie interests me in just one regard which is the frightening prospect that real people in the real world could actually relate to these jerks without despising them. I did not think it was made consistently clear that the audience is expected to despise them. If that was intended I did not get the message. So I wonder did the marketing research figure there are real people out there who might draw inspiration from some of these psychopaths? That prospect scares me more than any scene in this lousy movie did.
Lord of the Flies (1963) shows human being kids forming clans and acting like human kids would without adult authority controlling them anymore. It is believable and almost completely unlike this movie in that regard and others.
Flip flops and inconsistencies. Just a few examples:
1) Help, threat, help, threat: Threats, scheming against each other, not a care what happens to anyone else, then next scene rushing to help one another, then threats again constantly back and forth. For me this flip flopping was NOT done in such a way that it conveyed something meaningful and was not macho kidding around. The threats and scheming were depicted very seriously such that efforts to help each other then seemed a sudden flip flop and unnatural. I think the movie 'Into the White' did this threathelp thing well as a progression. SOL did not.
2) Teams win, individuals win: One moment it is all about the teams competing to win as a team, and the next moment it is all about how only one person wins and joins Hyperion. For instance Adrian (himself) won last year before being disqualified, no mention of a team. Makes no sense and so harder to have any understanding of their motivations.
3) Trying to survive, trying to win: They decide to pool telescope parts so they can "Go home" then a moment later it is back to trying to use it to win, then no, wait, surviving and going home is what its about, no wait, winning again. Real people do not have such random shifts of major motivations and (if it was supposed to) this aspect did not work at all as some sort of complexity of situationcharacters. It just seemed unnatural and not believable.
4) Tyl the Insecure, Tyl the leader: Tyl flip flops between forceful and spewing leadership jargon from inspirational posters to then doubt himself almost completely. Often you can't guess whether he will be Jeckyl or Hyde in the very next line of dialog. You can say cerebrally, that a person can have conflicting states like this, but as depicted it did not come across to me as any sort of believable character complexity.
5) Exclusive three name is not exclusive: Its made clear that having a "three name" is an academy status thing. KIT laughs at a guy like he is lowlife scum for lacking something so important. Then it turns out to be derived from one's three initials. So everyone has one, academy member or not. Nothing special and so no real kid would care about it so much. How to grasp a world in which the commonplace is something special?
Review by Jaseenit from the Internet Movie Database.
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