Outer Wild, The |
USA • 2018 • 85m •
   • Directed by: Philip Chidel. • Starring: Lauren McKnight, Christian Oliver, Jeffrey Vincent Parise, Tory Taranova, Jimmy Jean-Louis, Zach Roerig, Dean Stapleton, Kari White, Alaina Garland. • Music by: Kubilay Uner.   After an unnatural event leaves mankind nearly extinct, a runaway girl and a rogue bounty hunter brave a dangerous wilderness to find a fabled sanctuary that can either save or destroy what's left of humanity.
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Review:
Men had a different fate. They mutated, turning into horrible creatures filled with hunger and rage. They became a new kind of beast, and the world was now theirs. It was as if nature had turned its back on us and decided to start over."
The above two paragraphs pretty much tell you everything you need to know. The customary notions of cause and effect and traditional storytelling just get thrown right out the window in this movie. The whole movie is about "stuff" that "happens" for no apparent reason nor any explanation. The writer simply wanted a particular context in which to vomit out his philosophical perspectives and couldn't be bothered to even TRY to PRETEND that the movie was anything other then a thinly-failed exposition of his personal belief system.
Apparently "just because it happens", every male in the movie is either a literal monster (with horns and big teeth and suchlike), becoming a monster, or trying to either dominate, control, rape or exploit (or all of the above) women, even to the point of engaging in incest. Conversely, all women are long-suffering victims.
At the end of the movie, a "cure" for the "disease" of man-ness is even presented which turns out to be, surprise surprise, a revolver and bullets. The heroin, after just plugging what passes for the "hero" in THE OUTER WILD, snuffles a little bit (because, you know, it does take some women a little while to get over their attachment to men I guess) and then goes off to live in the perfect female colony, apparently making the point that women can "get past" their involvement with men if they really try. Or something. The leader of the all-female colony contingent even makes a statement about "taking you as my own" to the heroin, so apparently the women really are getting past men in a big way.
Seriously, the entire movie is like this. Just one scene after another, one vehicle after the other, of making the point of how put upon women are and how truly awful men are. The whole thing is wrapped in an appallingly delivered veil of a post-apocalyptic blather-or-other in an attempt to give it a science-fiction-y veneer. Absolutely everything about the movie is of the lowest possible quality, completely compromised for the purposes of delivering its "message".
I can't prove it but I seriously wonder if current events had something to do with the genesis of this movie. At the time of this writing it's the end of September, 2018. #MeToo is in full swing and liberals and conservatives are at each other's throats over the Kavanaugh confirmation. A huge majority of United States women have either directly experience sexual assault or some form of sexual intimidation in their lifetimes and are currently reveling in an orgy of revenge, and nevermind due process or actual evidence. Particularly fun is the fact that men are getting nailed to the wall left and right and any concrete proof is entirely optional. The timing of all this just seems very convenient.
Especially irritating about THE OUTER WILD is that the marketing hype for THE OUTER WILD, particularly on its own website, goes out of its way to conceal its agenda and wrap itself in science fiction themes to get you to watch it. This would probably account for my overflowing hostility towards it. By the time it fully dawned on me what THE OUTER WILD really was I had to stick it out to the end so that I could write an informed review. I utterly detest people who Trojan horse their politics and ideologies as entertainment. If they want people to watch their ideological masturbation they should at least be honest about it in the marketing. Then the people who WANT to watch that sort of thing can.
In other words, THE OUTER WILD is what happens when a feminist liberal arts major by the name of Philip Chidel, ostensibly a male based upon the name yet somehow still suffering from a terminal case of vaginosis, writes, directs, produces, AND edits his own overweening feminist pseudo-parable diatribe about the intrinsic holiness of women and unsalvageable horribleness of men. He would clearly prefer to BE a woman; someone should let him know that there are surgeons nowadays that could help them with that and just get it out of his system.
Review by S. Soma from the Internet Movie Database.
Movie Database