The Belko Experiment (2016, dir: Greg McLean; cast:
John Gallagher Jr., Tony Goldwyn, Adria Arjona, John C.
McGinley Melonie Diaz)
As a horror film,
The
Belko
Experiment is
highly unoriginal. Its plot structure is a basic horror
conceit: the lifeboat scenario, in which a group of people are
trapped in a situation, wherein, in order to survive, they
must choose whether to cooperate or turn on each other. This
basic conceit appears in Lifeboat,
Lord
of
the Flies, and
such Twilight
Zone episodes as "The Monsters Are Due on Maple
Street."
And in many trashy, low-budget horror and sci-fi films.
In
The Belko
Experiment, 80 employees are trapped in an office
building. Metal sheets have descended around the building,
sealing in everyone (something we've seen before in Dredd,
among
other films). They are then ordered to murder two
coworkers. Then 30 coworkers. How they choose the victims
is up to
them. But if they don't comply, twice as many will have their heads explode, due to previously implanted
mini-bombs.
This notion of forcing random,
ordinary people to murder each other was also used in the
Saw
series
(among other films).
Who's behind this plot? Some
unknown corporate or governmental organization. Why are they
doing it? Nobody knows. This concept of a faceless
bureaucracy tormenting people for no clear reason is
reminiscent of the Cube
series
(among other films).
So, originality is
absent from
The Belko Experiment. The film is a decent time killer
for hardcore
horror fans. The gore and action scenes are well made.
But this is
not a great film. Not a deep film.
Yet, as I was
watching, some
observations occurred to me ...
The Belko Experiment
could
have been a deep film, with much philosophizing as
characters debated
the moral price of survival, and moral issues such as
self-sacrifice,
suicide, and being ordered (upon threat of death) to
murder others.
The characters could have debated a lottery, giving rise
to a
scenario as in Shirley Jackson's The
Lottery. But there's none of that in this film.
No deep dialog.
It led me to
thinking.
The
Belko Experiment is an unintentional depiction of the
post-Christian
West. Eighty people face
a great moral dilemma in Columbia, a once Catholic
country. Yet none
of them even once mentions, or appeals to, God,
Christ,
religion, or the possibility of reward or punishment in
an afterlife.
No one prays.
Naturally, the
villains want
only to survive. But even Mike (the film's moral voice)
doesn't
appeal to God. He can only advocate ungrounded ethics.
Ungrounded, in
the sense of "This isn't right!" -- but without
any
greater philosophical or theological basis for his
claim. Because of
this, his moral appeals are baseless assertions rather
than reasoned
arguments. Shallow and trite.
This is also a very
PC film.
The 80 people are diverse. Men and women, gay and
straight, white,
black, and brown. Yet all the villains -- those
who organize
to murder their coworkers, in order to save themselves
-- are white
men. All of
them.
The film is also PC
in its
feminism. Overall (if not in every instance), the women
are braver,
smarter, and tougher than the men. When Mike insists
that everyone
should cooperate, and refuse to kill each other, his
smarter
girlfriend, Leandra, tells him that people aren't like
that. That
they will turn on each other. Leandra is proven correct.
Leander is not only
smarter
than the guys. She's tougher. She kicks ass, defeating
men much
bigger than herself -- even former special ops men --
despite being a
petite gal with no training. She essentially saves
Mike's life.
Likewise, the women
are
braver. When the villains select people to kill, one
woman snarls at
a villain not to touch her, a last stand of defiance
before standing
bravely against the wall. Instead, it's a man (a white
man) who
blubbers and begs to be spared, having to be dragged to
the wall,
before a villain just shoots him in disgust, right where
he is.
The Belko Experiment
is a
reflection of our modern PC cultural zeitgeist. Evil
white men.
Kick-ass women. Zero Christianity. The filmmaker likely
didn't do this consciously. He more likely absorbed these PC
values, and
regurgitated them without thought. The result on screen
is ... not
pretty.
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