Review: J.C. Chandor's Triple Frontier Is Eaten Up by Its Murky Lifelessness - slantmagazine

If you told most Chicagoans that their current mayor was actually an agent of monstrous, anthropomorphic porcupine-like aliens, they would probably accept that as true. Under Rahm Emanuel, dozens of public schools have been closed in communities of color, his administration was caught covering up the police shooting of Laquan Macdonald, and the police department was found to have been operating a secret torture site. Rupert Wyatt’s Captive State takes the ills that plague Chicago—from police corruption to racial segregation—and remixes them into a sci-fi allegory in which, in established alien-invasion dystopic fashion, the meaning of any given metaphor is never that far from the surface.

The film opens on the day of the humans’ capitulation to the aliens, with a black CPD detective and his family attempting to flee the city as authorities lock it down, a flight that fails in a tragic manner evoking recent police shootings. After an excessively expository credits sequence in which Matrix-style computer text essentially pitches the film to us, the story picks up nine years later with the detective’s son, Gabriel (Ashton Sanders), still planning his escape from the city. The aliens have co-opted human governments, constructing a totalitarian surveillance state operated jointly with their collaborators. Gabriel lives in the Pilsen neighborhood and works in one of the aliens’ data-retrieval-and-destruction factories, extracting data stored on confiscated phones and destroying the memory cards.

The aliens, who resemble human-shaped Brillo pads and are amusingly referred to in the film’s refracted version of our world as “legislators,” have an enmity toward digital communication that forces humans to fall back on landlines, payphones, carrier pigeons, and even newspaper classifieds as means of communication, clandestine and otherwise. It’s one of the film’s better ideas, as both Gabriel’s brother Rafe’s (Jonathan Majors) resistance movement and the police officer tracking them down, William Mulligan (John Goodman), have to rely on networks cobbled together from non-parallel technologies. In the hands of Rafe’s Phoenix organization, the organic technologies the aliens use to dominate life on Earth become a powerful tool of rebellion: In a truly suspenseful sequence, one resistance cell uses an invisible organic gel-bomb to attack a pro-alien rally at Soldier Field.

Captive State, whose exteriors were clearly shot in Chicago, features a number of lines about the city that will land like punchlines to anyone from the midwestern metropolis but that will undoubtedly pass most anyone else by. When Gabriel wants to escape via raft across Lake Michigan, his girlfriend, Rula (Madeline Brewer), protests, “But there’s nothing there! There’s no law there!” One presumes that, in the universe of the film, Rula is referring to some propagandistic claim of the aliens, but she’s also articulating many Chicagoans’ feelings about Indiana. Mulligan and Police Commissioner Ioge (Kevin Dunn) could be discussing immigrant neighborhoods transforming into overpriced hipster havens when Mulligan insists, “Pilsen isn’t Wicker Park, commissioner,” and Igoe cynically responds, “Yeah, not yet.”

All this regional specificity also lends Captive State some credibility. But close scrutiny exposes tears in the fabric of its world. For one, the aliens are stealing our “natural resources,” but nobody seems able to articulate which ones. The film also has that familiar sci-fi problem were sometimes the aliens are super-intelligent, authoritarian space-farers, and sometimes they’re just stupid monsters. There are structural issues, too, such as the 20-minute stretch of Captive State in which we see nothing of our ostensible main character—and there’s also the matter of the filmmakers seeming unable to decide whether that main character is Gabriel or Mulligan. And then there are the continuity flaws, like the video surveillance footage showing us the date as 7/9/27, when the scattered snow on the ground and the fog in the air clearly pegs this film as taking place during a typically dreary Chicago March.

Captive State recalls District 9 and Attack the Block in its evident desire to discuss race and class through the lens of an alien invasion. As in those films, the estranging setting of a society under siege serves two, sometimes contradictory functions. On the one hand, the advent of aliens on Earth is an event that exacerbates today’s social problems, and on the other, the post-invasion political context is a direct metaphor for current issues. Balancing these two aspects of science fiction—one a projective thought experiment, the other purely allegorical—is a difficult task, and it’s one that Captive State might have better performed if it consisted of more than a smattering of good but relatively isolated ideas.

Cast: John Goodman, Ashton Sanders, Jonathan Majors, Vera Farmiga, Kevin Dunn, James Ransone, Alan Ruck, Madeline Brewer, Machine Gun Kelly, Kevin J. O’Connor, Ben Daniels, Caitlin Ewal Director: Rupert Wyatt Screenwriter: Erica Beeney, Rupert Wyatt Distributor: Focus Features Running Time: 109 min Rating: PG-13 Year: 2019

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