The only thing I knew about this movie going in was at was an Ari Aster flick based off an old script that he rewrote to place in modern times (summer 2020). And boy was that the wrong decision.
The script was probably really cool originally – small town chaos, a shadowy organisation, corporate overlords. But making it modern day really took away from that, and it took away from that for multiple reasons.
1) Everyone was 1-dimensional, and I’m assuming it’s because we’re living with those characters in these modern times so, while we might see them as 3-D on the nightly news or in our local communities, thematically they’re only 1-D. And the majority of these 1-D characters are left wing, which means you get funny quips and protests – not the best movers of a movie. Right wing characters give you whatever conspiracy theory you want, gun violence, domestic violence, sexual violence… you get the idea – things that move movies.
2) Modernity is shoehorned in and make things not make sense anymore. A shadowy organisation that exists solely to stir chaos? Wicked. That’s a cool idea. Fuck yeah. Calling them Antifa? How does that work? How does a belief system of “Nazis are bad” turn into a well funded shadowy chaotic organisation?
3) Suspension of Disbelief gets continually broken. In films, you only get one opportunity to do something that doesn’t make sense but the audience will buy. Aliens attacking the world? Fine. Aliens attacking the world but also later Hell opens up and Satan comes out to fight the aliens? Wtf is going on? Well, you get that a lot when things are modern. Case in point: the right wing in this film hated pedophiles, but as we learned just this month, the right wing actually thinks Epstein was an American Hero, so the idea that those people hate pedophiles has now become a Suspension of Disbelief in a place that otherwise wouldn’t have had one.
The ideas were cool, but ultimately, can someone please tell Ari Aster no? After watching Beau Is Afraid, I was hoping someone would step up to the plate. Apparently not. This film needed to be an hour shorter with less focus on modern issues. I get that political movies will be polarising, especially ones that don’t take really take a side, but looking at it from a story perspective, making it modern just made it muddy and confusing.
