knives wrote: Fri Jul 03, 2020 4:49 pm
Given this complex and ambiguous lampooning which undermines the hopefulness of the final image of
If... I'm very curious about what specific criticisms were launched against the film in Thatcher's England.
5 years later... Apart from British critics' then-antipathy to anything determinedly anti-realist (unless it was, say, French), its fairly easy to see, as a Brit, how this would have ruffled feathers. For critics on the right, un-patriotism and left wing bias would have been the charge, especially in the context of the Falklands war and related jingoism. Anderson's hated
Chariots Of Fire would have been more the ticket for the flag-waving crowd. I don't think they would have been too happy with the horror movie aspects either, as Anderson gets away with blood-sprayings and gore that might have put less reputable filmmakers on the notorious video nasties list within a year or two.
For critics on the left, the film's satire aimed at NHS workers and trade unions would have easily been enough to provoke. Having said that, unlike, say,
Carry On At Your Convenience, you get the feeling that the unions are critiqued here for
insufficient militancy, their leaders too easily bought off and cowed by class.
Despite not being too wild about anything Anderson except
The White Bus (maybe my fave Brit film), I quite liked this. Readable as an analytical film (ostensibly on Britain's decline, though widened to satirise "human folly" in general) in the form of "low" Brit comedy (especially, of course, the
Carry On series), complete with "madcap" scenarios and stereotypical stock characters. A fine idea, and the sort of thing that could have been done by the more political (and middle class) humour of
The Comic Strip et al in 80s Britain (in fact, a couple of faces who would later show up in their productions are here). But the film fails in its attempts to bring an authentic slab of broad comedy to the table - the humour here is too moralising and nowhere near libidinous enough, despite the presence of Robin Askwith amongst a cast stuffed full of familiar faces, cult faves and character actors.
The ludicrously overstuffed nature of the film means that at least
some of it will work for
someone, and portions of this are genuinely funny, especially when the grand guignol aspects are brought in, referencing Hammer horror and sci-fi Brit cinema strands. Plentiful references to previous Anderson films in here too, which gives it the air of a career-capping statement that it may not have been intended to be.
Frustratingly, after a scattershot hour and a half, the last 30 mins or so of this are full of solid brilliance. And with a terrific, and chillingly prescient ending:
What used to be called "the establishment" (headed by HRH Queen Mum Lookalike) and the revolutionary protesters (maybe the nearest thing to "Team Anderson" here, though they're not fully off-the-hook either) finally get to confront each other. But they meet as mere audience members for the grand unveiling of humanity's real post-human trajectory, "Genesis", the proto-AI device whose much-vaunted "intelligence" only stretches as far as regurgitating Hamlet, getting stuck in a perfect glitch at the sentence equating Man and God. And putting the film's prior focus on very human fallibilities into scary perspective.
