Sunday, November 13, 2005

The Crazies: Fuck the Troops.

Earlier, I demanded that Hollywood do a remake of John Carpenter's anti-capitalist/pro-alien killing movie "They Live" on the logic that, if they're going to remake Carpenter movies, they might as well remake one that has an idea or two going for it.

Recently, I watched one of George Romero's first films, 1973's "The Crazies." It's a explicit Vietnam allegory about a U.S. government biological weapon spill in a small Pennsylvania town and the Army unit sent in to contain the disease, which makes everyone exposed to it go insane. The movie contains some really bracing scenes that are blantantly, and deliciously, anti-troop. U.S. soliders kick down people's doors, shoot civilians, and steal shit out of abandoned houses and rifle the wallets of dead folks. In 1973, this shit must've been like a shot to the nuts for most of your patriotic Americans, and that was during Vietnam, when there was a generally ambigious feeling about what U.S. soldiers were really up to over there. Imagine how that kind of imagery would effect an audience TODAY, when we're in the middle of re-doing Vietnam in the desert, but the ambigious feelings about the moral culpability of American troops has been replaced by a mindless, knee-jerk endorsement of every person wearing combat fatigues that reaches across the political spectrum.

A remake of "The Crazies" is currently in the works, hot on the success of the "Dawn of the Dead" remake, another Romero film chock-a-block with social commentary that was watered-down for a big-budget studio. Now, although I revere George Romero, and think that "The Crazies" is pretty awesome, it was shot with a budget that seems to have consisted of a half-full bag of returnable soda cans. Romero did a valiant job working with the resources at hand (there's some striking compositions, including a stark, unsettling and highly memorable opening sequence), but the wires are definitely showing. Decent production values could turn this great idea into a truly excellent film. However, the big budget pretty much guarantees that the cool, subversive, troop hatin' stuff is going to be the first thing tossed in the waste basket. That's a goddamn shame, but I do wonder how the hell they're going to suck the social criticism out of a movie about a U.S. city being driven mad by government criminality and incompetence, then corralled by clueless and casually violent American soldiers. "Dawn of the Dead" was easy, just stick to the original plot skeleton: people hiding from zombies in a mall. Most of the satire in that one was produced by clever shot selection. But even the most elemental plot points of "The Crazies" are subversive as hell, especially with Iraq going on as it's being made. The Hollywood hackmeisters have their work cut out for them. Maybe the biological weapon will be released by terrorists instead of a plane crash, and at the end, some Army private discovers the cure in his bible. Ah, I can smell the suck from here.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home