The kind of movie that you have wonder how it even got made.
Only “Schizopolis” ever got away with substituting mannered weirdness for meaning, but that hasn’t stopped a lot of people from trying. This muddled mess of characters with no motivation, depth, or even consistent personality traits features a woman trapped in a world that is changing for no reason ever given, with people behaving in bizarre ways, a wall growing over the horizon and slowly expanding to cover a sky that now, again for no reason ever explained (and which most characters change the subject whenever she points it out), has two moons. A war is declared for no reason, everyone under 32 must report for the draft, and there’s hamfisted attempts at some sort of social commentay about blaming the poor for their poverty, or about war, or about news media being government propaganda, or some such, but it’s hard to understand because it’s all briefly touched on without ever being explained, or even being consistent from scene to scene. Add in an unexplained mid-movie change to black and white, along with many seemingly totally perfunctory and unengaging attempts at “artsiness”, and you have an incompetently-made mess that desperately wants to be Godard or “Brazil”, but isn’t even “An Evening With Beverly Luff-Linn”.
Sorry, but you can’t, say, evoke the horrors of war with a sudden, unexpected firing squad scene if the most character development you’ve done of the rebels now being executed (who it’s never even explained what they’re rebelling against, unless it’s the black patent-leather platform shoes that many characters seem to focus a lot of attention on needing to wear now, for no reason that’s even explained) is to show them frolicking in mountain meadows to a Donovan folk song to signal in mile-high letters “THESE ARE THE GOOD GUYS”. By the time people who were the villains in previous scenes show up and stand in front of the rebels to shield them, which somehow all by itself persuades the executions not to shoot, after which everybody just gets on a bus and drives off into the clouds, I couldn’t have cared less why any of it was happening.
This big question in my mind is, how did they get Michael Madsen, as well as distantly memorable actors like Judd Nelson and Billy Baldwin, to participate as supporting actors in this garbage? And if they had that budget, why didn’t they cast people who can act for the lead roles? (To be fair, it may not have been bad acting, it may have been the editing. Apparently the didn’t realize if you’re shooting the lines of a scene separately with a single camera, to be cut together into continuous dialog in the editing room, as is very common in filmmaking, you have to cut out the pause where, after delivering each line, the actor freezes and waits for cut to be called.)
One of the least-justifiable 100 minutes of movie-watching in my life.