#like for sport. like i thought there was some larger deep state esque plan in place to enact further medical barbarism upon me for giggles

[batemanofficial]

i need weed. i need a medical card so bad or im gonna go out of my fuckign GOURD

[pelikinesis]

warning:  this was a casual review of the movie Outcast, until it wasn’t (and then it kept going)

i just watched Outcast, because it was free on Tubitv and because it had Nicolas Cage and Hayden Christensen on top billing. the fact that it was supposed to be set in 12th century China was even more baffling, and probably racist. it has a 5% on Rotten Tomatoes. but...

but i had to know. i had to see this for myself. so i did.

and now that i have, i’m puzzled as to what exactly they were going for.

amongst other things, they literally forget about one character. there’s a random peasant girl, and i say that because that’s how she was first introduced, and given that she has virtually no other scenes and does literally nothing of significance, she’s still just a random peasant girl by the end of the movie.

the only thing she contributes is that, by rescuing her, Hayden Christensen’s PTSD Crusade veteran can be reminded he’s redeemable. she interacts maybe once with each main character afterwards in short, terse scenes. tomorrow i’ll wake up, remember watching Outcast, and struggle with my own memory on if there was a fourth character in that movie and call bullshit on myself. that might even be the main point of writing this, to prove it wasn’t a completely mundane embellishment on my part.

and i start off mentioning that, because it’s the only way to explain how Nicolas Cage is in a movie where he’s missing an eye, sports the most improbable and jarring hairstyle yet, and at one point wears live snakes on his arms while yelling in incomprehensible angrish at Hayden Christensen who is in a fever dream, and yet i have to remind myself of those details because his character is somehow forgettable. 

and i may be biased, but i imagine it has to do with how little he is in the movie. I’d be surprised if he were in more than 30 minutes of the entire movie. he’s there in the prologue, appears in a handful of flashbacks, then shows up at the end to have a dramatic Boromir-esque final stand shortly after telling his whole “here’s what i was up to between the beginning of the movie and now, it’s very tragic, let me tell you, in words, in expository dialogue, in this incredibly visual medium, what happened to me and why you should care”

another thing i’m going to remember tomorrow is Nic Cage’s shockingly mediocre rousing speech to his troops ala King Theoden at Helm’s Deep (the LotR references are apt in the worst way, trust me), because no such thing happened, and yet it needed to, for the climactic battle of traitorous Blackguard vs. Nic Cage’s wacky mountain bandits. because otherwise, the mountain bandits have no incentive to risk their lives for the falsely-framed prince--it’s been established multiple times that no other group, not the palace guards, nor town inhabitants, nor merchant caravans from the Middle East, were willing to fight on behalf of the true heir to the throne against the patricidal tyrant prince. 

but no such speech happened. there’s an incredibly bitter reunion between the two white Crusade veterans where they clear up a minor misunderstanding, become friends, and then suddenly not only Nic Cage but his entire mountain bandit gang are down to fight against impossible odds against the best soldiers of the empire. at the very least they needed a scene where they somehow agreed they were going to do this thing, but they didn’t even go through the motions. 

i was actually confused when i saw them starting to collectively mess with jars and powder and stuff. i thought they might be deciding to flee or something, and then i was wondering if i must have misheard or misinterpreted the past several minutes of dialogue. What was their plan, exactly? I understand why it had to be a last, desperate stand with no possible escape routes (hence the Helm’s Deep reference)--because the prologue of the movie had to have a call-back at the end, with the turntables bieng turned. very poetic, yes.

but there’s no indication that this battle has to happen. They’re deep in the mountains. They’re being harried by a force of fully armed and heavily armored infantry. They had to cross a large river and were only seen getting across in a series of thin, canoe-like boats. there’s every indication that the main characters, aside from Anakin, had time to come up with a plan beside “last stand against hopeless odds” because while i can buy some of the Blackguard catching up to their general area, it couldn’t be the entire overwhelming force presented in the climactic battle.

on the other hand, if in fact several days or even weeks had passed and Anakin was unconscious for the whole time, as opposed to at most a day as all clues indicate, then Nic Cage would have asked the royal siblings and maybe even Random Peasant Girl what the hell was going on, and could have made preparations for escape well before the Blackguard could have arrived in force.

come to think of it, they basically started off a set of character arcs and only like one or two got resolved, namely between Anakin and Chinese Padme. i mean, the character is literally a princess so this analogy actually works. also, the actress clearly was doing the best she could with the script, much like Natalie Portman. it was the most okay thing about the movie. she even gets a feminist speech in on Anakin, though unfortunately his reaction scene is very rushed.

so i’ll always be in favor of gratuitous feminist speeches, as opposed to gratuitous sexist speeches, when it comes to both fiction and real life, and even though it seems rather bold for a 12th century Chinese princess to tell off a white Christian crusader about how the horrors of war also affect women, interrupting his guilt-ridden man-pain pity party at a perfect moment. and he pauses and then says ‘u rite’ which would be fine if the camera didn’t end  the scene with a very short shot of his face turned away from the camera. should have been right on him shoving his foot knee-deep into his own mouth. for symbolism.

and when i say it’s gratuitous, i do believe that’s mostly a function of that scene ending so quickly. if that scene continued, it could have gone somewhere interesting, even flowed into their obvious romantic arc.

finally, the whole concept of a movie about white European crusaders finding themselves caught up in a royal coup in Song Dynasty-era China (unless i’m doing history wrong, which is very possible) after being disillusioned and traumatized by their war experiences in Jerusalem--that’s not a bad concept. 

the prospect of following a character who started off galvanized by genuine religious fervor, to struggling with the reality that the Crusades, like the majority of other wars, is about greed and power, then ended up complicit in war crimes and massacres just by doing their job as soldiers and holy duty as Christians--as they go from that to becoming embroiled in the bloodshed of royal succession, that’s a jarring-ass thing. they’re completely difference worlds in every meaningful sense.

but the fact is, the writing isn’t very good, at least not in the state it was clearly cut into, and furthermore, the above concept would only be sufficiently meaningful if the film was done with a Chinese language, where Hayden Christensen and Nicolas Cage do their dialogue in the language of the setting the film is set in. there’s absolutely no way that subtext could be earned when it’s the presence of the two top-billed white males as part of the rationale for a film that was filmed in, set in, and made most of its money in China to have English be the spoken language.

and that’s super annoying because i hate the fact that I have to read the synopsis of a movie like Outcast and be correct in assuming there’s something racist about--because there didn’t have to be. this could have been--no, there COULD BE films featuring multicultural casts of characters set in the distant past that aren’t racist, or pandering, or whatever. i wish i didn’t need the skepticism that i have to that idea.

the whole prospect of different people from different places in the world suddenly cross paths, at a time when the world was so comparatively disconnected it was effectively much larger, and living in different empires were essentially living in different worlds, is always interesting to me, precisely because i’m so bad at history. Just looking at the wikipedia page for my birth year to see what events occurred at the same time i debuted my life, it’s overwhelming.

in 1989 the Showa era gave way to the Heisei era in Japan, a distinction i really only understand in the context of Kamen Rider; Ted Bundy was executed in Florida; the nation of Iran placed a $3 million bounty on Salman Rushdie for authoring The Satanic Verses;  Exxon spilled 240,000 barrels of oil into the waters around Alaska; there were the Tiananmen Square protests; the Game Boy was released; The Berlin Wall is torn down; The Velvet Revolution begins in Prague; Salvadore Dali and Lucille Ball both died that year.

one thing that struck me is how simultaneously few and many names there are in the births and deaths lists. the pattern that emerges from these lists is on the one hand, unsurprising, but on the other, infuriating in a way. performers and politicians populate these lists. everyone else becomes relegated to memory. just like Random Peasant Girl. i could imagine a writer gave her a couple more scenes that would have made her a meaningful character in the movie. and those scenes got deleted, and her story doesn’t make it into the film that people saw.

i just realized how far this has gone from what was originally a review or rant of Outcast. I’ve been watching a lot of video essays recently, most of which are about video game franchises. they’re really well done, at least the one’s I’ve seen. Off of the top of my head I remember the name Noah Caldwell-Gervais, or something like that. Cadwell, maybe. I’d check, but then I’d probably keep writing, at least until the weed wears off completely.

it’s weird how listening and watching essays makes me miss writing/composing essays, giving speeches, and all that. or maybe it’s just weird how i like doing that sort of thing. or how i’m really impressionable. or maybe Outcast was weird. 

Outcast *is* weird. I also hope that we’re reaching the tail end of the ongoing film industry convention of giving movies really bland, generic names. Outcast. Jumper. Shooter. mmm, no, i should take back that last point. i’d have to look at more lists of movies to see whether this is just confirmation bias or actually a thing. Jumper and SHooter are way older movies too i think. anyways, i hope that we’re reaching the tail end of a lot of things that are currently ongoing. like white supremacy and continuing to permit systems of governance that permit and entrench white supremacy and other bullshit.