Caius Nocturne

An incredible spy movie parody that skewers the suave spy cliche by framing him as the equivalent of the old guy who stares at women on the bus and trapping you with him for a feature length movie. It makes for a surprisingly workable comedy, and makes you not complicit with how he behaves. 

So much of this non-complicity comes from how OSS 117 is painfully stupid and unfunny to everyone he meets. He's like a dude in an RPG who constantly rolls a 1 in speech checks. Everyone near him looks at him as if he dropped trou and took a massive shit in public. It also helps that people around him try to correct him on his ignorant views and they just fail to penetrate - he is in a world of his own.

Being forced to be with him and especially be forced to sit in the middle all of the conversations he kills for the entire movie, along with him being blatantly terrible at his job creates extremely fertile ground for cringe comedy.

One of this movie's major strengths is lead actor Jean Dujardin. He has an amazing range of emotions and expressions in this rendition of OSS 117, more than the actors he's parodying. Every time he makes the time to pause and laugh at a fucking terrible joke he makes when nobody else is always gets me.

This movie doesn't just effectively deploy edgy humor in a way that effectively allows us to laugh at misogyny and racism, it also manages to use his extremely stupid adventures to say something about imperialism and the imperial powers of the time.

A ridiculously stupid movie that had me laughing so much throughout. Watch it!!

I feel like I need to say this to really outline the level of movie we're working at - THEY GOT AN NSA AGENT TO DOWNLOAD AN EMAIL ATTACHMENT IN A PHISHING EMAIL.

Wonderful cinematography, married to a really bad script with really terrible sound design. If it wasn't for Michael Mann's aesthetic and those aesthetic levels being off the charts, I would have stopped watching halfway through.

In this movie, the NSA and FBI have security practices that are worse than your average office IT room, there's a terribly crowbarred romance arc, and an overwhelming lack of point to the scale and casualties to the whole thing once you get to the end. I was laughing or gasping in disbelief multiple times at really cringe dialogue or plot choices and as the finale reared its head, I was sort of slouched back, waiting for it to get on with it already. The only moments that kind of woke me up were where the camera work was doing something really cool and interesting and AESTHETIC.

I'm not a person to notice sound design much because I don't really have even a small amount of knowledge or experience, but there were many instances of obviously bad ADR, and so many sound effect choices that were extremely basic and wrong - like someone subtly opening a pocket knife only for the sound effect to be a big echoey *schwing!!* like a sword being brandished in a fantasy film. Completely takes you out of the moment.

This is such a rough movie, the production is so all over the place that I feel like I can't call it anything other than below average. Oof.

"Don't you ever cry for as long as you live. As long as you live, never do it. Do you hear me?"

As other people have mentioned in the reviews for this, this is a conservative propaganda movie through and through in it's production.

But after like the first 20 minutes or so of 'patriot' dogwhistles and crying about gun ownership, the propaganda basically mostly disappears and the movie becomes an extremely bleak tale in which children feel nebulously compelled to fight an army way beyond their scope while also repressing all of their emotions because they don't see another way out.

There was an early scene that really stuck out to me where a couple of soviet troops were stopping at the entrance of the Arapaho National Forest. One of them asks the one who can read English to translate the sign. The sign actually just talks mostly surface stuff like how big it is and that Teddy Roosevelt 'founded' it, but the soldier's 'translation' is about historic indigenous genocide. I imagine the conservative thinktank writers were like 'this shows that these leftists twist everything into how bad things are!!!', but like, both are probably true? And then the children, barely able to properly hold a gun, killed them all. The last one to die was sitting in his car, bleeding out. His killer quietly observed him before summoning the nerve to pull the trigger.

Maybe this is just a 2020s socialist millennial perspective, but apart from some really crowbarred elements at the very beginning and the very end, it didn't feel like there was any particularly good or bad group of people, it just seemed like everybody was miserable. The only thing in my mind that this could function as propaganda is simply from traumatising a young audience, but I don't know, it doesn't seem like that's the best form of propaganda in the world? I suppose it's propaganda in a rare tradition, one also taken up by The Turner Diaries.

I was expecting a cheesy, pathetic, mewling movie about how America has gone soft and how we really need more red-blooded american patriots, but instead I found myself really resonating with the emotional undercurrents of this movie which seemed pretty divorced from any conservative cultural objectives. This combination of a beautiful, isolated wilderness and a group of people who are too young to even know who they are, let alone what they're doing in a really grim situation.