Southland Tales

Well I finally got around to seeing Southland Tales, which was written and directed by Richard Kelly of Donnie Darko fame. It has been quite some time since Richard did anything, with Donnie Darko being both his first and last major project before making Southland Tales. I must say, it certainly appeared as though it would be interesting - especially with such interesting casting decisions, including Dwayne Johnson (The Rock), Sarah Michelle Gellar, Seann William Scott and Justin Timberlake. There are even a couple of interesting actors that play smaller parts in the film, including Christopher Lambert and Mr. Inconceivable himself, Wallace Shawn from The Princess Bride fame.

The setting of the film is also very interesting, as the film starts off in the relative present, but sets off down an alternative path. A nuclear bomb is dropped on Texas which sets off World War Three, and the United States are cut off from all their overseas oil sources which puts them in a very compromising position. The government locks down the country, and in the state of panic becomes more of a dictatorship. In order to combat the energy crisis, a massive tidal power generator is built off the coast of Los Angeles, which causes some interesting problems later in the film. Dwayne Johnson plays Boxer Santaros, an actor with a case of amnesia, Sarah Michelle Gellar plays Krista Now, an adult reality television star, and Seann William Scott plays a cop. They all get involved in an extremely convoluted plot.

While this film wasn't necessarily bad, Richard Kelly did make quite a few mistakes in making the story far too complicated for most audiences to understand. Quite frankly, I had major problems trying to keep up with everything that was happening. Basically the audience is presented with a huge amount of characters, each with their own agendas and business, without really being told why everything that is happening is happening. By the end of the film things make more sense, but because of the sheer overwhelming amount of information the film looses its focus and doesn't make quite the impression that Donnie Darko did when the climax occured. Surprisingly, when the film was first released to the film festival circuit, it was longer and even more complex. In order to get a distribution deal with Sony, Richard Kelly had to edit the film to center more around just the three main characters, and cut down on a lot of the extraneous footage. In its original form, I can only imagine how mind boggling the film would have been.

Richard Kelly also tries to incorporate a lot of his quasi quantum physics ideas, which worked in the most part for Donnie Darko but seem to fall short of their mark in Southland Tales. For instance, the massive tidal power generator in the film causes the Earth's rotation to slow fractionally, which messes up the time/space continuum and causes a rift in the fourth dimension in the desert. Okay . . . Although I guess it could be possible in some twisted reality, it doesn't seem to make a lot of sense. Which is similar to a lot of aspects in the film, they hold good ideas that could work if executed correctly, but Richard often falls short of executing them in understandable ways.

So did this film live up to the high expectations set by Donnie Darko? That would have been a pretty hard thing to do, and although this film had its merits I don't beleive it did in the slightest. The film is very dense and there are a lot of hidden gems in there, making it worth a view, but as a whole its slightly disappointing that it wasn't better than it turned out to be. Although most of the cast were questionable actors, they actually did a fair job of playing their roles in this film. I must admit I was concerned about Justin Timberlake's role, but he did play a fairly small part and worked as a disfigured soldier. The film is definitely worth watching, as long as you can bear the sheer amount of information presented.