Arcadian

Decades after the fall of modern-day society, a man and his sons live in peace by day in the idyllic countryside, and in terror by night as ferocious creatures stalk the land for human prey. When the man is nearly killed fighting the creatures, the boys must come up with a desperate plan for survival, using all their father has taught them, in order to keep not just him and themselves alive, but the future of humanity as well.

I’m always in the mood for more Nic Cage.

How can you not be?

People might dismiss his easily-imitatable ticks and quirks, his familiar voice and intonations, his wild-eyed expressions, but there are very few actors working today who can reap the benefits of such familiarity, who are able to go so big, to erupt so effusively while on screen, pressing boundaries and taking risks, who are then able to turn around and shut it all off, to keep it all within, playing a character so quietly, with such a different but equally as powerful kind of intensity, it’s almost as if he himself were a completely different person.

In all seriousness, Nicolas Cage is Gen X’s greatest living actor, or at the very least… he’s the bravest and most daring.

So, I was drawn to this film for two reasons. One, obviously… Nic Cage. Two, this movie is set in a world that has ended in a fit of wild violence, a thunderous societal collapse, before sliding into the desolate quiet of scattered survivors beginning again in the windswept ruins. I’m into the romance of such setting. Despite this particular setting now feeling kind of like “spoilers from 5 years from now” I do love me a good post-apocalyptic-set story.

So, when I came across a movie offering Nic Cage in a Post-apocalyptic world?

Say no more, mon amour.

The film begins with Nic Cage escaping with two infants from a city in the grip of warring warlord-led factions. It then jumps to fifteen-ish years later as he and his two teenage sons—the kid who played young Bill in the It reboot, and the kid who played young Will in the Lost in Space reboot—live in a remote country farmhouse far from the ruins of the world. Their lives are governed by a strict routine. Part of the routine comes from the fact that they are very much surviving day-to-day. They are isolated and alone. Their nearest neighbor is a well-armed farm in the next valley a few miles away. The neighbors are friendly, but still aren’t willing to share much with them, as resources are scarce. So, during the day, they work their farm, they hunt and gather, and otherwise spend their time cobbling together equipment and resources from the wreckage of the old world, all while being careful to avoid any dark places and the locust-like insect swarms that nest there.

But most importantly, no matter what they might be they’re doing, above all else… they must always be home well before sundown. Before the sun sets each day, they must lock up their house, carefully going from room to room, barring every window and every door, and ensure that it is all locked tight. Because whether it’s raiders, or zombies, or vampires… it’s unclear at first, but whatever it is… each night it comes and it thrashes at their doors, batters at their windows, and scratches at their walls.

But the nightly monster visits aside, the main problem here is really the fact that teenage boys are only ever teenage boys. Even the best ones are still mostly stupid assholes, too often driven by petty jealousies and anger, and/or by over-confidence and an undeserved sense of entitlement, when they’re not being driven by their dicks, and these boys are getting lax. They sneer at the strict routine. They bitch about their lives of isolation. Worst of all, they are starting to come home too close to sundown. Nic is struggling with keeping them safe, and it’s only getting worse.

Because unfortunately for Nic… a teenage girl lives at the closest farm.

So, the first act is Nic just trying to Dad, and to hold things together, while we wait for the boys to fuck things up by being stupid. Which they eventually do, because one of them is twitterpated, and the other one is mad about it. After that, the film is pretty much that Jeff Goldblum quote from Jurassic Park 2: “Oh, yeah. Oooh, ahhh, that’s how it always starts. Then later there’s running and screaming.”

Because it turns out, the things that attack their house each night are some kind of subterranean monster that looks like an emaciated horse crossed with an ant? A kind of lanky lizard-dog meets Slenderman-monkey thing? I don’t know what they are, or what they’re supposed to be, where they came from, or why they do any of the things that they do in this film, so I can’t really say more than that. This is mostly because of some script issues, but a big part of this film’s monster problems are rooted in some very typically bad low budget genre film production decisions.

I’ve probably mentioned before how, in order to succeed, a good low budget genre film needs to understand the benefit of shadows when it comes to their monster, as the bright light of day only reflects off the zippers, but at the same time, it’s a fine line between benefiting from a little darkness and making things too dark to see what the fuck is actually going on. The Arcadian is mostly the latter, which is too bad, because these weird ass monsters do some weird ass shit that I would really like to get a better look at, like for instance… when they chase our heroes across the fields by linking arms in a giant multi-monster tumbling ring.

I swear.

It’s like this, but with like… two dozen weird monsters linked at the same time.

I really wish I could find some clear pictures of this so that I could show you, but I can’t, because the scene was just too dark, but I swear, I have never seen a more not-scary, ridiculous, out-of-left-field stupid thing show up in a film, a thing that I think the filmmakers completely intended to be scary. It’s such a failure. And the way it just happens too, and kind of doesn’t even showcase it? The film is so casual about it, like “Yeah, they do that sometimes.” It’s insane. I had to rewind it several times like “what the fuck was that shit?” If the movie itself wasn’t so not good, I’d almost recommend checking it out just to see this dumb shit.

But it’s not worth it, so don’t bother.

While I can appreciate the way the movie doesn’t spoonfeed an explanation of what caused the apocalypse, or what these creatures are exactly, and attempts to tell all of that through context clues… it doesn’t pull it off.

For instance, I can’t help but wonder how the first part of the film—where Nic Cage escapes a violent societal breakdown, sneaking himself and his two infant twin sons out the city, heading for the isolation of the countryside—fits with the monsters that attack their house at night. Were the monsters not a part of the societal breakdown? Are they just an additional aspect of the apocalypse? Was the societal breakdown just a coincidence? I’m sure there’s a connection in the minds of the filmmakers, but there isn’t one in the film.

Also, as a genre nerd, I am definitely used to that thing where genre shows and movies are set in “generic America City/Chicago/New York” all while clearly having been filmed in Vancouver or Toronto, but it’s rare that there is almost zero effort to obscure this fact. I bring this up because The Arcadian is very obviously filmed in the UK. It is so clearly the UK from the start, not just from the countryside, but from the actual buildings too, that I just assumed that’s where the film was set. The thing is… while it’s true that the film never says where it’s set at, never makes any reference at all, not even in a vague way, there are no Irish or English or Welsh people at all, and I mean characater-wise, because everyone very clearly speaks in an American/Canadian accent. And once you start to notice that the film is set in the English countryside, but everyone talks like an American, you can’t un-see it. It’s just a weird little thing that pokes at you throughout the film… Are they pretending that it takes places in the American countryside, or is this a small community of American expats in the UK who all survived the apocalypse and then moved to the same general area?

This isn’t a deal-breaker or anything… it’s just weird.

The deal-breaker is that The Arcadian is a very mediocre, mostly because the story it tells is half-baked and incomplete, with big pieces that just plain old don’t fit together. You could either cut out the monsters, or cut out the first scene, and the film would be instantly improved. But as it stands, I’m not even sure what the point of the story was. I wondered if it was maybe a poor adaptation of a second rate YA book that I’ve never read or heard of, but as far as I can tell, it’s not based off a book, it’s an original story. So, instead it’s just… I don’t know. I suppose you could say that the film is intended as a post-apocalyptic slice-of-left, but honestly, by the time the credits roll, with the way the film ends, I was mostly left wondering… What was this film even about?

Worst of all, it wastes Nic Cage.

That’s bullshit.