On the Silver Globe

This is about as ambitious as it gets. It’s a three-hour multi-part epic following a society forming from the ground up, and continues all the way through their tumultuous dispute with wobbling killer bird people. It has a chilly blue tint, multifaceted dialogues, and some notably impressive costumes. This is also about as weird as it gets. Ummm… I’m almost speechless. It’s… just really f*cking weird.

There’s a considerable amount of humor (that I’m not sure was intentional?). The theater-esque acting is about as overblown as it gets. The air is probably sore from all of the characters fervently grasping at it. My synopsis wasn’t an exaggeration either. The enemies are giant wobbling charred Peeps. It’s funny and campy, but in a movie as artsy as this one, it just adds an extra layer of bizarre. I think that the crew must’ve been aware of how silly all of this would come across, especially with a pretty lauded cult filmmaker like Andrzej Zulawski (known mainly for the extremely polarizing Possession) at the helm. There’s plenty of savage and disturbing violence to top it off as well. This movie just… god*amn. I don’t know.

Much of the film is missing, so it’s filled in with bits of rapid explanatory narration and constant jump cuts that seriously hamper the first half. If you can make it that far, there’s still some pretty incomprehensible Shakespearean sort of dialogue and histrionics to get through. I hate using the P word, but it does come across as fairly… pretentious. It seems like a grower though. I didn’t like it initially, but I was compelled to watch it again and again. The style is cool, weird, and original enough to appreciate, but for those poor unsuspecting souls that don’t know what they’re getting into, ‘difficult’ won’t even begin to describe it.