Last and First Men (2020)

I’ve been looking at my Century of Cinema progress and been… I don’t know, maybe a bit bothered that so far it’s leaned somewhat heavily on horror. That’s because I do have a fair bit of that sort of thing in my collection waiting to be watched (and indeed rewatched), but my general taste is broader than just the horror end of things and I’ve felt like I should maybe cast a slightly wider net than that… so, for title #30*, I looked at the unwatched videos on my hard drive for something a bit more serious and arthouse, and picked this. And yeah, “serious and arthouse” was what I got. Woof. I think I may need something trashier to balance me out after this…

Anyway, this is based on the novel of the same name by Olaf Stapledon, fairly famous SF novel from 1930 that, frankly, I’ve tried but failed to read in the past… from what I can see, this mostly just retains the plot conceit that the 18th and last human race is contacting us, the first human race, from two billion years in the future; the story of the intermediate races is kind of passed over. Also, this is one of the most abstract book adaptations I’ve ever seen; the only things that appear on screen (there’s no humans involved apart from Tilda Swinton as the narrator from the end of humanity) are spomeniks, the old Yugoslavia’s somewhat perplexing WW2 memorial monuments. They’re as bizarre in this film as I suppose they must be in reality, these giant abstract concrete things that just appear in random parts of the landscape. All of this originated as a multimedia event (played here in Sydney among other places) by composer Johann Johannsson, who died of a drug overdose before the film was finished; there is quite some beauty to it (the monochrome Super 16mm film visuals are often stunning), but the thing is quite plodding and felt a lot longer than its 71 minutes given that it doesn’t exactly follow a conventional narrative or plot. Still, I can’t say it didn’t give me what I was looking for from it, so there’s that.

*You may notice I haven’t actually made that many posts for this tag, which is because some of them have been rewatches of films I reviewed years ago at my old film blog. Apart from The Unknown and The Naked Gun, I haven’t felt any need to say anything else about those ones.