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August 11, 2006
Ferdy at the Movies - Stay Out of This Fortress
Regular readers will know that I don't do movie reviews, I do movie warnings, so if you don't want spoilers, stop now. I think, however, you'll have a much happier life if you decide to never see Fortress and read this review instead.
Fortress is intended as a sort of sci-fi action version of Cool Hand Luke, where you have a sympathetic hero who gets sent to prison and refuses to give in to the Establishment. In fact, Fortress borrows from a lot of movies, and if you're a movie buff like Bruce or The Girl Who Feeds Me you can have a lot of fun calling out stolen scenes: "Hey, that's from Lawnmower Man!" "That one's from Shawshank Redemption!" "That one's from every single prison movie ever made!"
The film portrays a future in which the world is controlled by pro-lifers and environmentalists. Suspension of disbelief is required in order to accept that you can put pro-lifers and environmentalists in the same room without them trying to kill each other. Anyway, since abortion is illegal, the United States controls the population by limiting each couple to one child. The hero of the movie (played by Christopher Lambert) is trying to escape to Mexico with his wife so they can have their second child, their first having been stillborn. When they're caught, both are sent to a high-tech escape-proof prison run by an evil corporation called Men-Tel. Men-Tel is taking the children from the imprisoned women and turning them into cyborgs that don't need to eat. When mankind is entirely replaced by the cyborgs, it will end world hunger. In spite of this extremely humanitarian goal, Men-Tel is portrayed as an evil, faceless entity that thinks its employees are company property.
Men-Tel has technology that enables them to read prisoner's minds, but it is apparently only used by the prison director to watch erotic dreams by the prisoners. When a fight breaks out in an early scene, instead of using the mind reader to find out who started it, they resort to torture.
The prisoners are controlled by a device called the Intestinator, which fastens itself to the wall of your small intestine and can be used to cause you intense pain. It also contains an explosive so they can blow you up if you've been really naughty. Poison would be simpler, but blowing someone up allows the special effects department to throw all sorts of blood and gore around, which is a big part of this film.
The Intestinator provides an unintentional running gag, as the prison warden is constantly shouting things like "Intestinate prisoner 95763!" or "Commence random intestination!" By the time the film is half over, you have spent so much time watching people pretending to be in pain that is becomes silly instead of horrifying.
The thing that bothers me the most is that with all this technology, the prison is actually fairly loosely run. The few cameras in the prison move slowly along fixed tracks, so the prisoners are able to plot and plan without the warden getting even a whiff of it. The situation is made worse by the fact that the warden's habit of watching the hero's erotic dreams causes him to fall in love with the hero's wife. I think this is supposed to provide some dramatic tension, because the wife has to put up with the warden's advances. This tension evaporates quickly, however, because cyborgs can love but they can't have sex, and essentially all the wife is enduring is a lot of talk about the future of humanity.
I'm sure some people think movies like this are important because any moment now evil corporations are going to overthrow the government unless we're really vigilant and vote for pro-choice politicians. However, when you walk away from this film, the theme you take with you is not hope, vigilance, or the triumph of the human spirit. Instead, you feel like you've just spent 95 minutes watching actors pretending to be in pain. If you enjoyed it, you need your head examined.
So, if you want to see a science fiction film about tyranny and the triumph of the human spirit, rent Equilibrium. It doesn't have nearly as much blood and gore as Fortress, but it has a lot more intellectual content, and in this case, that's a good thing.
Respectfully submitted,
Ferdinand T. Cat
# At Fri 2:53 AM | Permalink | Trackback URI | Comments (0) | More Ferdy at the Movies | Tags: environmentalism Equilibrium Fortress Lawnmower Man movies science fiction Shawshank Redemption The Girl
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