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Dissonant traveler, pestilent carnival. "Are you also divergent, friend?" Wise's The Andromeda Strain is the point of departure, the future after a pulverizing plague is frozen Philadelphia with a laboratory in the catacombs. "The world belongs to the dogs and cats! We live like worms!" Convicts make handy guinea pigs, thus the barcode-tattooed lug sent back in time to collect info on the virus that will decimate the populace, a touchingly bemused Bruce Willis. "Science ain't an exact science with these clowns," he bounces from 2035 to 1990 to 1996 and back with a detour in World War One trenches. His is "the agony of foreknowledge" in a realm headed for extinction, the Cassandra Complex as diagnosed by the kidnapped psychiatrist (Madeleine Stowe). The title refers to the eco-terrorist league headed by the virologist's twitchy son (Brad Pitt), a guerrilla Renfield who may be responsible for triggering the epidemic. "Maybe the human race deserves to be wiped out." "It's a great idea! But more of a long-term thing..." A Borgesian expansion of Marker's La Jetée, a spiraling companion piece to Brazil, Terry Gilliam's rococo camera in full swing. Polluted Nineties air is a balm to the hapless prisoner used to layers and layers of plastic, his eyes well up gratefully at a Fats Domino song on the car radio. "You haven't become addicted, have you, to that dying world?" Not much separates padded cells and street corners, the escape dream is a tourism ad and insanity is something to hope for. Suspended chairs before wide-angle inquisitors, giraffes on an elevated highway, textures worthy of Borowczyk. Vertigo in a revival house, fateful rendezvous at the airport terminal. "The movie never changes, it... can't change, but... every time you see it, it seems different because you're different." Déjà vu in the liberated zoo is the upshot, Gilliam's own Slaughterhouse-Five and no mistake. Cinematography by Roger Pratt. With Christopher Plummer, Frank Gorshin, Jon Seda, and David Morse.
--- Fernando F. Croce |