UPDATED HERE: ANGELS AND ASSHOLES: THE SAGA CONTINUES…
Are you fucking shitting me? A movie based on an Angels and Airwaves album?!?!? Is Hollywood really that bereft of ideas? Is this the end of the world?
According to the movie, yes. Love is the story of a lone astronaut stranded on a space station who witnesses the earth’s demise. Then he goes through a wormhole and sees God. Because God is love, get it? (*Ducks the two-by-four of obviousness.)
These scenes are intercut with those of major historical events, most of which are wars, including our very own Civil. I guess that makes this a fucking Civil War reenactment movie as well (nerd alert!) Expect lots of beards and lots of slow-mo in this cumbersome treatise on humanity.
Visually, the film looks amazing. It’s kinda hard to fuck up the grandiosity of space. Of course, any contemplative film set in space owes a great debt to Solaris and 2001, both of which are echoed here. The downside to that is William Eubank is no Kubrick. He’s yet another flashy commercial director who thinks he can tell a story about life, the universe, and everything just as good as the masters.
Well color me surprised, he actually comes close. There’s nothing incredibly new about Love, but Eubank manages to give us 90 minutes of semi-intelligent eye candy. Unfortunately, the film is “driven by the powerful music of Angels and Airwaves” (the band’s words, not mine.) So all Eubank’s hard work is shot to shit. The score (and I use the term loosely, because for all I know these are just A&A instrumentals thrown over the film) is so over the top and so earnest, any inkling of narrative subtlety is raped with a knife. My heart is filled with emotion to the point of bursting! I weep gigantic, salty tears for the whole of humanity! The bass makes my balls tingle!
Thank your maker of choice that there’s none of Delonge’s patented nasally whine to accompany this symphony of melodrama. Can you imagine his bratty snarl reverberating throughout space? God would be so pissed! It still blows my mind that the guy from Blink 182 thinks he can actually sing. It’s like when a dog thinks he’s people.
Where does that leave us? There’s a good film fighting to get out here, it’s just being smothered to death by the pillow of Tom Delonge’s ego. Love is perty to look at, but the score assaults the ear canal like that bug in The Wrath of Khan. I’d recommend it to adventurous cineastes, die-hard Angels and Airwaves fans, and possibly the deaf.
An explanation of Movie Reviews… From The Future!
