
As odd as this may seem, I will now make a 180-degree turn and discuss a documentary film: Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing. This film poses the question: is it ethical to portray mass murderers as they wish to be depicted, within the very culture their crimes took place in? Oppenheimer (and co-filmmaker Christine Cynn, as well as an Indonesian director whose name is unknown) went to Indonesia to not only interview the aggressors of the mass killings that happened in 1965 and 1966 but to also let them perform their stories through film. With how these directorial trolls work, these men responsible for the slaughter were allowed to play pretend: transforming themselves into detectives, and gangsters, even participating in things like filmed Broadway shows. To explain in this context the film The End(2024), which is Oppenheimer’s debut feature-length film, is going too far. This film also shows how the imperialistic father and son narrative having father issues was a central theme in The Killing: a documentary concept that contained such violence that it transcended hatred and guilt, as epic in scope as it was terrifying. Which is a major theme in a lot of stories, and it’s that this universe of violence is always obscured by a higher cause. ‘I’m the baddie?’ ‘No, I’m just building a bigger empire.’
By the conclusion of The Act of Killing, both the remorseless killers of thousands of people and the final survivor, who literally has to struggle to not vomit through his realization of how twisted he has become, have crossed all the lines. After the similar documentary The Look of Silence which also was about the mass murders in Indonesia, Oppenheimer took a rest from directing. It is mentioned that there is not much financial profit that comes with creating documentary films in order to sustain oneself, and this is precisely why he has worked on fiction’ now, however still a majority of issues in the world today, form The End. This film is a musical intended to forewarn people of what the world will look like if people continue to be the way they are, as the plot shows one family (one that the creators intentionally did not name so that the audience could imagine various real-life influential families instead) residing in some bunker. Due to climate change and gasoline fires, most of humanity has ceased to exist. It is arguably not an accident that the oil former family leader who owned such a house built underground is also an oil industry executive, Michael Shannon.
Though this family bears an immense burden in being responsible for wiping out the vast majority of the Earths’ population, they make every attempt to enjoy a comfortable life. Among the few people they rescued to keep them company, in the confines of the bunker, a doctor (Lennie James), a butler (Tim McInnerny), and a chef yes to whom they claim to be a family friend, but in fact is seen as just another servant (Bronagh Gallagher). In addition to his son, the wife of the tycoon (Tilda Swinton) and their intellectually underdeveloped adult son (George McKay) all reside there, while all the other family members have died. The son has spent nearly his entire life in the ghetto, which explains his peculiar actions and complete ignorance of the civilized world. Not that the kid went around the world pulling rabbits from hats, since every single relative is willing to lie to the other and to himself, the prolonged gaslighting for years brought with it many a falsehood (but then again who are we kidding, with almost all the rest of the world populated bereft). Out of nowhere, for the first time in what seems like forever, a strangler has come across the bunker (Moses Ingram). As is natural, their initial impression of her is one of distrust and so is their attitude towards her.
She becomes enamored with one of the family’s sons (and vice versa), making the dynamics of the family much more complex.
The film beautifully accentuates the tangled cycle of remorse and pride that comes with never taking responsibility for actions and underscores this at the onset, but sadly doesn’t deliver it in The End. At the very start, there is a good promise with the picture of the child’s son’s toy train that takes us to the first performance of the movie. The melody is nice and the rationale is understandable (Throughout the conversation each family member talks in an incomprehensible, distorted manner to reflect how the family has gone downhill, but during the songs, they express their feelings in a sane manner). The artwork presents the notion that there is hope for a better world, notwithstanding the fact that the history as presented by his dishonest parents becomes a little disturbing to the son in the picture.
The movie advances, and we are provided with the reasons as to how the family lived in an underground place for so long (still, not all pieces of information are given to us, hence, we are able to think and imagine some things). About one hour into the film, it actually seems to start gaining traction as the strange outsider is now fully integrated into the family and the rest of the family is rapidly coming to terms with the issues (of the world and of their own).
About two hours into the movie, I start to feel as though The End is beginning to implode in on itself. It keeps on spitting back the same ideas to the audience time and again. Apart from the son and the stranger not much more evolution can hardly be said of the rest of the characters. That would be acceptable if The End did not seem to have a stronger point to carry itself to. Instead, it offers an uncomfortable and unsurprising conclusion that we were all well aware of from very early on in the movie: our persistence will ultimately be our downfall, and the worst of us are too obstinate to stop messing things up (which means that they will very likely be the ones who determine the rest of our outcomes). During the last thirty minutes, the movie reveals its weakness, which is its narrative structure conflicts which emerge do not resolve anything or have any bearing on the ending, and a final confrontation which contains a message (in that this family survives through sheer willpower but will never suffer for the sins they commit, thus are they really alive) but which has no impact on the audience is rather disappointing although it is shot in a beautiful way, on the one hand, suggesting that the end is the beginning which is the end that is the beginning.
What is interesting is that the final section of the film is the factor that actually brings the entire film around, The End, because it illustrates that the audience is left wondering what the earlier dragging was all about.
If the intent was to stick to the same themes, it worked well enough and so this need not have been an epic of two and a half hours. There was no need to make it that long and turn into such an anticlimactic end. It’s painful to admit this because what The End encompasses appears to be quite promising. Most of the numbers are great, including Swinton’s singing about imaginary conversations with her dead mother or Shannon’s character in the play about a far too forgiving owner who shrinks at the idea of facing the consequences before going back to what he used to be. The use of a bunker, or any room in the bunker, for a sound stage was interesting, and the emptiness of this post-apocalyptic environment is very bob foss-like (bare and raw). Even the confused and out-of-rhythm singing and dance moves have come from the delusional upper class who think of themselves self as graceful as a swan so that no one in this time steals the show with expert moves. Everybody puts their best foot forward with their characters, and to attempt to decide who was the best in such abundant talent would be missing the point.
Though there are interesting ideas and sequences, The End disappoints when viewed as a whole as it wastes the potential set forth by the single components. There are even fundamental editing mistakes when the final phrases of the shot lead nowhere and the transition or cut fails to continue the rhythm of the previous scene into the next one. In the beginning, I presumed this was done on purpose, so as to represent the characteristics of clumsiness, but by the third act, it was evident that no linear narrative was put together well and this was probably all that could be achieved with the recorded footage. Enough of those great moments (and there are quite a lot in my opinion) are so impressive that The End very often does not have time to prepare you for the upcoming one and this is really annoying. For the most part, I like how this film looks, sounds, and feels.
However, it is crossing my mind that there are some problems that I cannot simply brush off, the first being Oppenheimer II Sasasamo’s inability to make a point (and unfortunately vice watch two-three times into the same thing) and the second apparently examined in the paper visible deficiencies in the final work. Now this is a musical: probably one of the most edit-averse types of films given the amount of timing, choreography, and other such footage flat-out being required.
What Oppenheimer could have overlooked with The Act of Killing is that as the musical numbers are being directed by evil people, we are being told new things.
The End attempts to humanize these characters. While the intention behind it is good, there is absolutely no need to make the effort when these people will not completely reveal themselves to us and even when there is no evolution beyond ‘Look, that’s why bad people do not alter’, which is pretty vapid. It depresses me as I was quite eager to comprehend a lot of things from the great concept and strong cast to the marketing teasers which hinted that the film is going to be much more sophisticated than what we get (the film even asks us for subtlety because it looks much deeper into the theme) there is not much depth in the film considering it was made by a director who derived stories from some of the most shameless and brutal history of mass murderers. In The End, it is a tragedy that Oppenheimer and so many of his fellow characters have not much to say, in fact, it appears as though their destinies were settled the moment the story was conceived ( which I guess validates the reason for the title of the film). The End is not a terrible view irrespective of what does work but it is, however, a disappointment precisely because this film had the capability of being much better or in fact, just better at all.
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