The Mutant Chronicles
Simon Hunter | USA | 2008
111 min
War and sci-fi movies are generally studio products while independent movies tend to be smaller personal dramas. So when you have an independent movie that deals with a global war, alien invasion and retro science-fiction, it can be an oddity — but also one that stands to be examined. The Mutant Chronicles is such an oddity: it takes a bleak past and throws it into a grim dystopian future. It’s part orthodox, part crazy and part artsy; but most importantly, very independent.
In the year 2707 (a future that seems more probable than one would like to believe), Earth has been stripped of its resources. The world itself has been divided into three corporations that wage wars (using their private armies) and battle for the remaining resources. Lack of oil and a polluted skyline pushes machines back to the steam engine. Amidst this — as humanity faces extinction due to the appearance of a multitude of deathless mutants — a rag-tag team of unified soldiers attempts to eliminate the common enemy. Deprived of humor and hope, the soldiers resign themselves to a fate they may accept but are willing to fight against.
The Mutant Chronicles, in its lack of color and faith in humanity, is bleak to the extent that the surviving humans do not even hope for Earth to be saved and abandon it easily, moving on to other planets to possibly scourge more worlds. The movie does defy logic, and consciously so, and so the outcome is quite predictable. But it’s a dirty, bleak and sordid story of a morbid Earth, with scenes of pure bliss — scenes that make it a significant departure from the heroic movies that Hollywood churns out.
Faith is woven into the movie’s storyline as an important theme, but serves an ancillary purpose: to add subjectivity to the motives of some of the characters, and to form an interesting parallel to many of today’s belief patterns. Eventually though, what really makes The Mutant Chronicles an astounding movie is the same reason why it will have detractors, and that is its incongruous mix of the traditional and the eccentric.