I sup­pose the strangest thing about this film is the fact that it’s actu­ally kind of good. It’s good in the way that “hey I can see the aspects of this film that are really very clever” or “I really like the way that shot looks”. But over­all this film will be very dis­ap­point­ing for many peo­ple, mainly huge fans of Don­nie Darko who expected this film to be like that. I’d heard from a friend that Richard Kelly said after mak­ing Don­nie Darko that he wouldn’t be mak­ing another film because he’d made the per­fect film. This kind of direc­tor ego­tism is usu­ally reserved for direc­tors like David Lynch, whom can pretty much make what­ever film he or she wants to make and not care if their fans actu­ally like it. This is quite evi­dent in this film, that is overtly com­plex, and unabashedly vague on what’s actu­ally going on. I think that Richard Kelly fig­ured that if he under­stood what was going on, it would be clear to the audi­ence, but over­all I can’t believe this to be true.

Another aspect that made this film so unusual for me was see­ing a ton of actors who usu­ally do com­edy work in a seri­ous roles (i.e. Will Sasso from Mad TV, or even Cheri Oteri from SNL). Essen­tially South­land Tales is about a post-apocalyptic/post-9.11 world where we are run­ning out of nat­ural energy sources and a sci­en­tist who devel­ops what they refer to as a per­pet­ual motion machine which takes waves from the ocean, gath­ers the energy and sends giant pulses of energy toward land, pow­er­ing any­thing from cars to fac­tory build­ings infinitely.

So that’s one aspect of the film, sec­ond, because of the energy cri­sis and other polit­i­cal fac­tors includ­ing a fic­ti­tious bill that was passed for height­ened pub­lic secu­rity, there are essen­tially watch tow­ers through­out the city where Justin Timberlake’s char­ac­ter (an ex-marine) will sit and mon­i­tor the city for pub­lic vio­lence through the scopes of their guns and shoot to kill any indi­vid­u­als caus­ing dis­tur­bances. This part of the film is impor­tant to under­stand because the over­all polit­i­cal theme of the film is that the coun­try is divided in two, and that the Repub­li­can party is try­ing to win over Cal­i­for­nia and gain power so they can run the coun­try ruth­lessly (sound familiar?).

So on top of all that Dwayne Johnson’s char­ac­ter (yeah, that’s right, the Rock is the main char­ac­ter in this film) is a movie star who was abducted and drove into the desert and returns with amne­sia and a screen­play that pretty much details this dystopian future in which the film takes place. I won’t bore you with the details, but essen­tially every­one in the film is double-crossing one another to try and enhance the chance that the Repub­li­can party will win the polit­i­cal race by using Dwayne Johnson’s char­ac­ter as black­mail. So why was he abducted into the desert? Because a giant vor­tex exists where if some­one dri­ves through it they go back in time and come out with a twin copy of them­selves that is from 69 min­utes in the future.

Doesn’t this film sound crazy? Well it is, it’s like there are 5 dif­fer­ent films rolled into one. Not to men­tion the part of the movie where Justin Tim­ber­lake lip syncs to a Killers song for no appar­ent rea­son. So why did I say ear­lier that this film is actu­ally kind of good? Well more than any­thing the film is good because even though there is all this crazy stuff hap­pen­ing that doesn’t really make sense until the end, you’re drawn into it, and you can’t look away (kind of like a car wreck). Also, even though I wouldn’t ever say I like most of the actors in the film, they all did well. Usu­ally the actors in the film do cheesy roles that don’t amount to any­thing in the scope of Hol­ly­wood real­ity, but I hon­estly feel that all of them can really say they did a real movie, some­thing that even though it won’t be received well, will be a tes­ta­ment to form of film as art.

So if you’ve got an open mind and low expec­ta­tions I think you’ll at least be able to admire Richard Kelly’s attempt to make an artis­ti­cally com­plex film. It has that uncom­fort­able atmos­phere to it that makes you feel like you’re watch­ing a David Lynch film, yet it has all these really pop­u­lar actors so you feel that famil­iar­ity. Also, the music is quite good with lots of props to dis­so­nant Radio­head songs and other moody aspects of the score that add to the film, rather than dis­tract. At least watch the film for the fact that you can appre­ci­ate what’s try­ing to hap­pen, rather than what it actu­ally is.