Review of the film “The Purge in Arcadia” with Nicolas Cage

A post-apocalyptic horror film, Arcadian, directed by Benjamin Brewer, is being released. Mikhail Trofimenkov for an hour and a half it was not possible to understand or even see what was going on on the screen.

When you watch “Judgment Day in Arcadia,” your imagination helpfully suggests a burlesque plot in the spirit of “The Producers” or Mel Brooks’ “Silent Movie.” That is, films about crazy swindlers who approach producers with such insane offers that no one can refuse them.

So it is here. Imagine that director Brewer and screenwriter Michael Nilon come to a producer with a proposal to make a film about the end of the world. “Great,” says the producer, “but who turned off the lights?” “Well,” say the co-authors, “neither the heroes nor we ourselves really know. Either some kind of lilac fog is floating over the sea, almost all the people swallowed it and died. Either some bugs bit everyone. Well, in general, something happened, they turned it off and turned it off.”

“It’s a great, witty idea,” agrees the producer. “How are you going to film this end of the world?” “Well, well, there will be something smoking in the background, and in the foreground something will be crunching under the feet of one of the few survivors.”

Great, great. Who exactly is this survivor? And then Brewer and Nylon play their trump card. Who-who? Nicolas Cage in a leather coat. And now Paul (Cage) crunches through the wreckage of civilization, rescuing two babies from under its ruins – Thomas (Maxwell Jenkins) and Joseph (Jaeden Martell).

And the producer has absolutely nothing to object to this. Because Nicolas Cage, if not since David Lynch’s Wild at Heart, then certainly hasn’t played in a single more or less decent film in a quarter of a century, is in himself a walking apocalypse of the acting profession. An amazing man with the unchanging expression on the face of a victim who was subjected to brutal torture by either ninjas or reptilians – they tied the laces of his sneakers, but he can’t figure out why he always stumbles and falls.

What’s next? Then fifteen years of post-apocalyptic existence pass. The few survivors live on farms and wait for the appearance of certain “heroes from over the hills.” Clever Joseph plays out the legendary chess games of Mikhail Tal – this, of course, is very flattering to the national pride, but how the hell did he even know about Tal in this terrible new world.

Dad, meanwhile, smokes cigars. And when Paul gets into trouble, the neighbors refuse to share scarce antibiotics and even threaten him with a shotgun. At the same time, everyone eats very well. And even a wrecked car found in a barn is started with half a turn. “I switched the relay, that’s all,” explains one of the heroes. What would that mean? No less than they plundered secret NATO warehouses, where supplies of food, smoke, booze, gasoline and ammunition were stored for half a century in advance.

The question of everyday details of the world, fifteen years after the end of the world, is, of course, of a purely rhetorical nature. But with all due respect to the screenwriter’s and director’s arbitrariness, I would like at least some logic in the universe constructed by the authors.

There were certainly no sheep stored in those NATO warehouses. Nevertheless, our victims of the end of the world successfully breed them. And this despite the fact that around their farms everything is being narrowed and narrowed by certain “they”. Terrible creatures, furry, toothy, fire-breathing and flashing so quickly on the screen that it is impossible to make out their true essence. The easiest and most logical assumption is that these creatures are test dolls lying around in warehouses from the filming of Alien or Jurassic Park.

Why didn’t they eat the sheep before digging under the houses of preppers and killing off the older generation of on-screen characters? Maybe they profess some kind of reptilian religion, according to which lamb cannot be eaten. Or they simply don’t know how to skin sheep. Or they themselves are sheep, turning into monsters under the cover of darkness.

In short, it is impossible to describe The Purge of Arcadia using more or less specific terms. Everything happens here for some reason. There are “someones” wandering around the screen who have suffered from “something”. In general, everything is “somehow like this.” This meme has long summed up the parody of a director on set giving directions to actors. But it seems that it has not been embodied for a long time to such full extent as in “The Judgment Night in Arcadia”.