Sitges 2010: 8TH WONDERLAND Review

Now here is a 2008 French science fiction satire that seems to have eluded the ScreenAnarchy crowd, and outside of a fairly limited festival run outside of Europe (winning a number of prizes in the 2009 edition of Fantasia), remains surprisingly unseen. Heck, even inside Europe it has not penetrated too far, as it is just finding a Spanish premiere nearly two and a half years after the films Market debut at Cannes. It is ironic that a film about getting media traction fails to get any sort of traction with its own core audience. Do not let the long shelf life fool you though, this is savvy, dense filmmaking that should become a bit of a cult item when it is inevitably discovered years down the road. Any film that can coherently go from the kidnapping and hostage video footage of a turkey (the bird, not the country) to the acknowledgement of a brand new form of geo-political government is worth some time and consideration. Yes, even though it has only the tiniest fraction of the budget of Fight Club (or even Southland Tales), the scope of 8^th Wonderland grows at a similar rate as Tyler Durden's Fight Club evolves in Project Mayhem eventual economic collapse, and it has an epic collection of corporate sabotage antics that would make The Yes Men very, very proud. It probes the intersection of capitalism and politics and humanitarian issues that is reminiscent of those interstitial news and web segments that Paul Verhoeven was so fond of in Robocop and Starship Troopers. In short, 8^th Wonderland contains a lot of elements that I am fond of and has a tone that is a weird cocktail of hopeful naiveté and flat out cynicism; thus I am willing to forgive some of its dodgy acting moments and screen play contrivances. Good science fiction is good science fiction.

Starting with a small activist group in a chatroom on a closed-door website, the titular 8^th Wonderland, the film follows a few dozen members dotting the world from Senegal to Iran to Scotland who take various perceived social injustices (left-wingers all) and perform activist pranks such as installing condom dispensers around Vatican City or publishing the handsome leather-bound Darwin Bible with evolution-ist bon-mots sprinkled into the text. Failing to get traction beyond a quirky headline or two in the fickle and short-attention span media, they get bolder in their own media production, fashioning the group as a full country, with no geography outside the virtual, but a willingness to play on the global stage. The media sits up and listens when the G8 acknowledge and respond to their increasingly terror-driven tactics. Assassination, disease war-fare and other icky-moral decisions take the group down the slippery slope where the end is having an increasingly difficult time justifying the means. Or not. If nothing else, it they shake the system rather violently, and there are some interesting consequences, not the least of which is IP Address warfare, and a curious sparkle-tooth impostor which knows a little too much about how the group operates and is not afraid to steal the lime-light for a little of the ol' Ultra-Product-Placement. 8^th Wonderland may hammer home its points rather hard, discover-channel footage of cock-roach socialolgy is a bit much, but then again, its satire, and really when you are taking on everything from the AIDS to Peak Oil to Reality TV in the form of hundreds of news footage clips (in over a dozen languages) and web-chats you probably have to choose the tool for the job: A good old fashioned sledge hammer.

Appropriate for politics and sloganeering, the film has a polished look from its on the street grit to the posh hotels. The stumbling point may be the activist 101 talking heads scenes, which the filmmakers attempt to make as cinematic as possible with a fancy iMac sort of look, but do not zip and hum along at the break-neck pace of the news-footage. This makes the pacing a bit strange, and the ideas often come out a bit over-written. Yet, the filmmakers have a satisfying in-jokey sense of humour when they name an entire swat teem after the Aliens Marine crew - Vasquez, Hudson, et al. War Makes Fascists of Us all. Good Night and Good Luck. That is until the recently announced 9^th Wonderland pops up on the festival circuit somewhere in 2011. The will have to have swap in a black US president this time around.

One final musing: Brad Pitt and his production company should hand over World War Z to Nicolas Alberny and Jean Mach and let us see what they can do with a wider scope and larger budget.