ironSoap – Complete

Lunopolis

★★★★★

Directed by: Matthew Avant

Written by: Matthew Avant

The alternate title for this movie could have been, “Paul’s Perfect Movie.” Let’s see: Conspiracy theory? Check. SciFi action? Check. Cerebral thriller? Check. Scientology-like religious cults? Check. Documentary style? Check. Reasonable time travel? Check. Elaborate alternate history? Check? Speculative pseudo-scientific postulating? Check. Gritty, DIY style? Check. I loved almost everything about this film.

Okay, let’s back up a sec. Lunopolis is framed as a documentary that follows a pair of amateur filmmakers looking into a lead picked up from a phone call to an Art Bell-like radio host (very reminiscent of this). After the call, the radio show receives a packet of material which includes a strange polaroid and some GPS coordinates. The fimmakers track the coordinates to a remote watery area and find a hatch in a houseboat leading down into a strange chamber where they find a very unusual backpack-like device. Soon enough they are introduced to the Church of Lunology, a strange shadowy organization that is hauntingly similar to Scientology who begin hounding the duo and their intrepid film crew.

As the fate of the filmmakers unfolds in their handheld style, we are treated to interspersions from the “real” documentary makers who perform contextual interviews and follow-ups, providing supporting details for the scheme and revelations that come at first slowly and then with an increasingly frantic pace until there is a swirl of intricate history and wild speculation about immortality, rational consequences of time travel, dissections of Mayan calendar prophecies (particularly timely what with the calendar’s end late next year) and a whole host of other bits and pieces of conspiracy lore, fantasy elements and science fiction tropes. By the end, the questions are both answered and unanswered, and there is enough of a hint of plausibility that this could actually be a real documentary to give it that spooky X-Files creep-out factor.

The brilliance of Lunopolis is that Matthew Avant throws the kitchen sink at this plot and it almost all works. He works hard to cover the plot-hole seekers, inserting them into the dialogue and narrative by making his prinicpals as skeptical and nerdy as the people who are prone to enjoy a film like this. There is one concession he isn’t quite able to make fit neatly, which is the bit about polaroids and films (you can see this chagrined bit of deus ex machina happening during an exchange that marks the point where the movie truly descends into its delirious madness of a finale), but I’ll forgive the one bit of storyteller stumble for the rest of this remarkable work.

What I love the most is that because this film’s backstory is so incredibly complex and intertwined, I’m not sure how else this tale could effectively been told. Using the documentary style, Avant is able to spend considerable time discussing the revelations in the narrative in a very scholarly way without it feeling preachy or AYKB-ish. I don’t think a novel would have been able to have this visceral immediacy, and I don’t think a strictly narrative (even long-form like a TV show) film could have managed to explain all the intricacies of the time travel system, the fictional cult or the ramifications of any of it without losing the pacing. This is a movie that needed to be a movie—and maybe most significantly, needed to be this movie—and there’s something incredibly pure about that.

A couple of very tiny quibbles are that, because of the passion-project vibe, some of the acting is a little rough, although I was surprised at how much managed to be nuanced and believable. This may have something to do with the direction or perhaps the improvisational screenplay or even just that most of the cast are undiscovered gems in the acting world. The good news is, it isn’t bad very often, only glaring in context when it is. The other minor concern I had involves the status of the film’s macguffin, which seems sometimes to be lost from the perspective of the Church of Lunology and at other times I got the impression they knew where it was (both prior to the events depicted in the movie, and during). I wasn’t always sure what antagonists were doing or why, a failing that one can only ever really get away with in Men In Black type characters whose motivations are supposed to be mysterious. This is why it’s a quibble and not a legitimate gripe, but it skirts on a technicality.

Even with a couple of little head-scratchers, I still love Lunopolis. It’s not original in the sense that a lot of the stuff is drawn from source materials that I was already familiar with, but it’s blindingly original in that it was all reassembled and refactored into something that is fresh and accessible and awesome and makes me scream my ultimate compliment: “Why didn’t I think of that?” It’s genius.

Go see Lunopolis. That’s my recommendation: The sooner, the better.

from No Thief Like a Bad Movie — December 19, 2011 at 11:25AM