I thought turning the calendar on 2017 would bring some fresh new films from an acting genius who had unfortunately hit upon a bad slump. I thought Mandy was the next film in the WATC(H) and was destined to turn the tide and bring us back to highly watchable Nic Cage weirdness.

I thought wrong. 

The first film of 2018 was not Mandy (as I’d hoped) but was instead The Humanity Bureau (2018) a poorly conceived dystopian procedural that was almost (but not quite) as engaging as the lackluster name suggests. 

Before I get into my very brief [read scathing] analysis, I just have to ask, “who is Nicolas Cage’s agent that thought these scripts were worth his, or the audience’s, time? Are they even reading a rough outline before signing him up for these train wrecks? 

I understand that we are still working through the video-on-demand period of Cage’s career where he needed to make a lot of cash quickly to handle his tax and other debts, but my God these movies are really, really awful.

They’re disrespectful to the man and his legacy. And I’ve had enough. About halfway through this one, I shouted “mercy” to an empty room in hopes that someone would just quickly put he and I out of our collective misery. 

The World According to Agent Noah Kross

It is THE FUTURE. And it doesn’t look bright. Economic, environmental, and political collapse have occurred, food production and industry have stopped entirely and what’s left of America society exists in shambles. Does a new hope, a new regime, or a new order of jedis rise to meet the challenge of this post-apocalyptic world?

No, of course not. America gets what she deserves: A New Class of Bureaucrats. Yay. And this time, they’re armed. Uck. 

We’ve talked a bit about politics and bureaucracy in past WATC(H) reviews. You’ll remember I wasn’t all that impressed with the plot of Ghost Rider (even though it’s a film based on a comic book anti-hero) and I definitely didn’t love The Runner because: bluh politics. So I had some trepidation when I realized that Nicolas Cage would be taking on yet another paper-pusher-and-protocol role as Noah Kross, top flight agent of The Humanity Bureau, America’s last hope for survival.

What is The Humanity Bureau (asks no one in their right mind)? 

According to the movie, after the fallout of war, economic, and environmental collapse, the HB was tasked “with  assessing and separating those citizens who were deemed a burden to the system.” 

To what purpose you may ask? That’s the million dollar mystery of course, but it took me about five minutes to figure it out–even though they tried to cloud it in subterfuge and good intentions. The purpose: annihilation. 

The Humanity Bureau susses out people whom they don’t deem to be “productive members of society” and send them to New Eden–a supposedly fun place to go that no one who goes ever writes home about (or returns from). I am so indoctrinated in dystopian fiction and the WWII historical lens, I knew New Eden was code for gas chamber (or Solient Green) almost immediately, but I was patient and let Kross figure it out (very slowly) over the next 45-50 minutes. He is a bureaucrat after all. 

Does this round them up, tag them, bag them and take them to a new town sound a lot like a modern day Republican wet dream? Well, it should sound that way. This film came out in 2017, not too many months after President Drumpf took office, in fact there are some Make America Great references (a poster) and plenty of totalitarian overtones throughout the film. The plot even bends itself towards a Canadian emigration (escape) motif which was also a prevalent discussion in the months following Hillary Clinton’s loss in the election. 

In terms of the plot, it’s pretty basic. Kross is assigned to people (in his Xfiles) who living in U.S. “forbidden zones.” Local a traveling social worker / robobcop he must  interview each of them for potential “relocation” to New Eden. It involves looking at their tax returns and other boring shit like that. A cog in the machine, Kross has no idea, at first, what New Eden is, nor the evil in which he is culpable. He just wants to go fly-fishing somewhere like he did as a child, but there are no longer any lakes. Sad.

Kross runs across a woman, Rachel Weller, (Sarah Lind), and her son, Lucas, Jakob Davides, who are up for relocation, but who don’t want to miss Lucas’ musical recital. Kross is inexplicably attracted to this family, the boy especially, and empathizes with their plight. While Kross is investigating the family and what’s behind New Eden, he himself is being scrutinized by his superior officer, Adam Westinghouse, (Hugh Dillon). 

As we know Nic Cage characters do not like to go “by the book” even when that’s their main job responsibility. Kross decides to help Rachel and Lucas escape to Canada, once he realizes 1) that New Eden is in fact a gas chamber of sorts built to keep the “surplus population” down, and 2) that Lucas is his biological son. Shocker, I know. Turns out Rachel was taking on the identity of her former neighbor who had sexual relations with Kross about 11 years ago (or however old Lucas is in the film). 

Westinghouse pursues the now rogue agent Kross. The two have a bunch of cat and mouse shootouts, and Westhinghouse even loses an eye to a well-aimed BB gun (go Lucas!). The military arm of HB chases the trio all the way to the Canadian border (past immigrants German marauders and radiation fallout zones) where (spoiler, but not really, because how can a movie this bad be spoiled?) Rachel and Kross are eventually shot by Westinghouse, who gets shot by the Canadian resistance forces, allowing Lucas escape into Canada. In the last ten minutes (that no one asked for or needed), we see that the wiki-leaks info about New Eden provided by Kross, leads to an uprising in the U.S. that topples the Bureau once and for all. 

Is the world better because of it? Probably not. But we feel better knowing that the bureaucrats are no longer in charge of our misery.

The End.

Why? Just Why?

I have so many questions about what motivated Nicolas Cage to appear in this horrible film. I can handle dystopian stories (and actually kind of gravitate towards the post-apocalyptic fiction). I re-read 1984 and A Brave New World in the last year, which isn’t something normal people probably do. But conceptually, this film was just too dumb for words.

• Why for example, were these bureaucrats traveling into “off grid” places trying to seek out the undesirables? I can’t imagine these were the people who were the ones taking advantage of social services. In fact, it seemed like they were surviving based on their own ingenuity to begin with. 
• Why were there no lakes anymore? I understand global warming and what it is doing to our environment, but there was quite a bit of snow up in the Rocky’s which would have lead to actual lakes.
• Knowing that this agency was so hated by the commoners, why would they advertise their affiliation by imprinting The Humanity Bureau in large font on the sides of their vehicles?
• How did Kross not know that he had a son and with all his government clearance, why didn’t he track down this information?
• Why didn’t they choose a kid to play his son who actually resembled Nicolas Cage in some way? 
• Why the weird jokes and comedy bits inserted occasionally into Agent Westinghouse / HB interactions? There was one scene where he was flaunting the luxury of swimming in a swimming pool and was splashing his fellow agent? WTF.
• Why didn’t Nicolas Cage watch (or read) The Road, realize that this story had been told before in a much better and more intriguing and viable way and just say ‘Nah. Give me a different script, please’ ?
• Why was a lucky rabbit’s foot included a major prop in a movie that takes place in the not-too-distant future? I’m pretty sure most of the U.S. has abolished these things as unnecessarily cruel and crude by now, haven’t they? 
• Why is Kross driving an El Camino? El Caminos are cool. Don’t get me wrong, but given the timeline, we have to almost assume that it would be like if this movie had occurred in futurist 1980s, the main character would be cruising around in a Model T Ford. Wuh?

Canadian Propaganda

It’s a conspiracy theory, but I have to wonder if this film was some kind of Canadian response to the Trump presidency. A call to arms or insurrection. I don’t know. All the odd sort of themes about some Shangri-La lake in southern Canada, and Americans rising up to overthrow the anti-welfare bureaucrats. Feels a bit too “on point” for the dysfunction we have been subjected to in our real life political schema. 

I’d be all for a Canadian driven U.S. government take-over! Let’s rise up and take the power back. I guess what we’ve learned this week is that as the president of the United States (and literally anyone can be) you can start an insurrection after you’ve left office, and not be held accountable for it. So hey, why not team up with the friendly neighbors to the north and throw out all the Bureaucrats?

Firsts for Nicolas Cage as Noah Kross

• In a dystopian movie that also acknowledges our dystopian reality (Make America Great poster and photograph of Donald Trump)
• Fly fishing practice in his apartment
• Owns a Monet painting
• Driving an El Camino
• Gifting a woman a can of coffee 
• Starts a revolution against American fascism

Recurrences

• Shooting and killing someone in the first 5-10 minutes (Multiple)
• Getting slapped in the face by a woman (Multiple)
• Resuscitating someone who wasn’t breathing or whose heart had stopped (Bringing Out the Dead)
• Smoking (Multiple) 
• Sleeping in his vehicle in a hot, dry climate (Red Rock West)
• Physically threatening a feeble person (e.g. guy with a crutch) (Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans)
• In a movie with a villain who wears an eyepatch (Deadfall)
• Shot and killed at the end of the film (Multiple)

Quotables

“You must be a productive citizen. It is the law.”

“I’ve seen children drink their own piss.”

“We all must pull our weight.” 

“What is ‘the truth’?”

“You have no jurisdiction here.” 

“New Eden…is a death factory.”

“Be scared. Be very scared. You may be next.” 

“When I was a boy, I couldn’t wait for summer vacation.”

Conclusion

I forgot to mention how slow this movie was and how slow it felt. One scene focused on Rachel changing the batteries in a Geiger counter. Double A? Triple A? It was hard to tell. BUT as an audience, we sat and watched her do this. Why? Because the rumor was that Canada was a nuclear fallout wasteland and anyone who wanted to travel north would die from radiation poisoning or roaming bands of murderous marauders. It was quite the plot point that turned out to be just a bunch of fake news.

No radiation in Canada. No violent hordes to contend with. But still we watched Rachel meticulously changing the batteries on the Geiger counter just to be sure.

In retrospect, given a choice, I wished I’d watched Youtube videos of someone explaining how to use a Geiger counter instead of The Humanity Bureau. That would have been worlds more interesting than this American dystopia.

Moving on, Mr. Cage. Moving on. Finally, we’ll get to Mandy! For real.