
For a few minutes, “Arcadian” basically becomes “Aliens” but on an Irish farm with Nicolas Cage playing Ripley. Pretty much the best elevator pitch I have heard in my entire life. I mean, you pretty much know if you want to sign up for that or not. Do not get me wrong. This is not James Cameron-level filmmaking, but it is a practical creature feature which sidesteps a lot of the cliches of post-apocalyptic horror (we have really been seeing a lot of this in SXSW) and honors its concept. It seems that now, with the success of “The Walking Dead” and perhaps now “The Last of Us”, there has been a surge of movies portraying the situations of how human beings cope with the collapse of civilization movies like ‘Arcadian’ which is paleontological genre douses the promise that we the people are completely done.
“Arcadian” begins with Paul (Cage) running away from the zealous chaos that seems to be the downfall of civilization. The sound design incorporates sirens and explosions that fade away in the background. Huddled at a hiding place, he averts his eyes towards two infant twin boys. Fast forward fifteen years, and Paul is now living with his teenage sons Joseph (Jaeden Martell) and Thomas (Maxwell Jenkins). These characters are revealed to the audience as they become very frantic that Thomas has gone missing and hasn’t returned from a nearby Rose Farm, since it’s getting late. It’s been established that people are very cautious to be outside after dark falls.
During one of the meals, there’s a short moment of character development when we learn that Thomas is the younger, more reckless brother and Joseph seems more of the thinker, on the circumstance of how to move forward apart from just staying alive. The three women barricade all the windows and doors and move downstairs to the upper floor, and then something starts banging at the door, leaving deep gash-like cuts as if some whirls were trying to break the door. Those aren’t your ordinary wolf claws that did that. After staying a bit too long with the adorable daughter of Rose, Charlotte (a very good Sadie Soverall), Thomas runs home and falls getting lost in the woods after it gets dark. Dad leaves to rescue him. That is when things start to get really strange and director B. Brewer and writer M. Nilon wait to drop their bomb in one of the best genre B- Movies seen in a long time. Without getting into specifics, all we know is that it features a sleeping Joseph, an unstated space in a door, and an extreme shot that goes on for what seems like eternity to build up suspense.
What’s in those woods is beyond a reasonable imagination. Brewer probably told his creative team to keep coming in with creature design ideas, and simply said, “Let’s just do ’em ALL.” At its core, one can consider the monster as a combination of a slightly more primal version of a xenomorph and a parent xenomorph. There’s the almost crawling, twisting energy of the H.R. Giger monster but there’s so much hair and teeth and I don’t even know what. One of the main reasons “Arcadian” works is that Brewer knows how to mask his funds in a few quick shots of the creatures that don’t seem like a rip-off but are simply the sight of a thanking person being horrified. You don’t want to look at this creature, at least all at once. You wouldn’t be able to take it. Each time when you’re confident of what the hell these things truly are, they reveal an even more absurd array of designs. In one of the Insta kills, it just becomes a bottomless pit of teeth and slosh and blood, and who the hell knows what?
In modern days, horror genres have witnessed the inclusion of some really lacking entities, in the film “Arcadian”, it has been demonstrated that horror must be horror, be it the situation or the horror itself.
Though there are some of the choices in ‘Arcadian’, especially in the earlier parts, which goes against the movie. It seems as if Brewer was too much concerned about the attention of the audience that during the set-up, and so Heinrich goes completely Stuart’s vision in a shaky cam mode for the cinematography. The first couple of shots or any shots at the beginning of this film do not have to be shot in the way a Bourne film may be shot. And to Cage-heads, this one is more Martell, Jenkins, and even Soverall’s than it is Cage’s. All of them are fine, but the main concern is that people expect a lot of bloodbath and violence considering it to be another ‘Mandy’. This is a restrained version of Cage, who aptly knows that his role in the movie is merely of an auxiliary to the young cast, human and the monster.
“Arcadian”, in the opinion of critics may not contain much character arc or world-building for some audiences, but, once more, the creature design helps the movie surpass that almost universal deficiency of the genre. Talking about what has led to the self-destruction of the world or having great depth to the personality of the character is pointless when every night ‘that’ is the only thing knocking or banging.
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