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COLOR OUT OF SPACE
Director: Richard Stanley Cast: Nicolas Cage, Madeleine Arthur, Joely Richardson, Brendan Meyer, Julian Hilliard, Elliot Knight, Tommy Chong, Q'orianka Kilcher MPAA
Rating: Running Time: 1:51 Release Date: 1/24/20 (limited) |
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Review by Mark Dujsik | January 23, 2020 Color Out of Space comes from a short story by H.P. Lovecraft, who played in the realms of the inexplicable and relished in the unknowns of this world and beyond. His 1927 story "The Colour Out of Space" deals with a meteorite that crashed on the land of a farming family, ruined the crops and livestock, and eventually made the entire family go insane. Co-writer/director Richard Stanley keeps the basics of Lovecraft's story and updates the setting from the 1880s to the present day—when we think we know just about everything or could figure out anything else with a reliable internet connection. Some things, though, will remain beyond our understanding. While someone could explain Lovecraft's vision of decay and ruin as a simple but not-fully-understood case of radiation poisoning, the "Color" of Stanley's movie adaptation (co-written by Scarlett Amaris) is far less easy to explain away with known science. It's like an entity here, glowing in the night sky, as the meteorite approaches the farm, and still visible in the resting place of its crater. Several lightning strikes on the space rock soon after its appearance, though, appear to make the Color spread. On the ground, strange purple flowers bloom. The crops grow larger and with a slightly unnatural hue to their skin. The farm becomes overrun by that Color—in the grass, the trees, and the other plants. The water, a visiting hydrologist discovers, has become contaminated, although he is uncertain with what. Eventually, the Color appears to come alive as some kind of plasma, moving around as it infects the animals and seems to call to the Gardner family. The unknown is terrifying, yes, but there's an undeniable fascination in the horror that makes its call all too alluring. The movie certainly gets this part of its tale right, because it's the dread of the unknowable qualities of the Color and what it might do that are scary. Watching as the members of this family lose track of their senses—leading to a boy staring for hours at a well, thinking someone or something is talking to him, and a mother ignoring that her fingers have gotten in the way of a knife while chopping vegetables—possesses a macabre appeal that's quite similar to the draw of the meteorite and its unnatural Color. We want to know what's happening, but we also know that an explanation is unlikely. We don't want to see what's going to happen, but under these circumstances, the movement toward insanity and rot and death is inevitable. Before the meteorite strikes, that family is pretty ordinary, although with a few quirks. Nathan, the father played by Nicolas Cage, has taken over the farm from his late father, despite vowing that he would never do such a thing (He has started raising alpacas for their fleece and meat, which he insists is delicious). Theresa, the mother played by Joely Richardson, is a recent cancer survivor. The couple's kids are the occult-enthusiast Lavinia (Madeleine Arthur), the marijuana-smoking Benny (Brendan Meyer), and the bespectacled kid-brother Jack (Julian Hilliard). There's some tension at the start (The older kids resent living in the middle of nowhere, and Nathan and Theresa's sex life has hit a wall), but it's nothing too serious. Then, the meteorite hits. Ward (Elliott Knight), a hydrologist testing the local water for a planned reservoir, suspects something might have gotten into the aquifer, and sure enough, something has. The remainder of the story watches as strange things grow, animal life begins to mutate rapidly, and the mental states of the family members seem to degrade. Everything that was relatively reserved and, also relatively speaking, subtly observed about the family and the dread of the meteorite, as well as the Color that spreads from it, is amplified exponentially. The performances from the actors might have communicated an understated shift toward instability, if not for Cage, who goes overboard and does a strange dialect whenever Nathan is possessed by some personality-shifting quality of the contaminated water/Color. His eccentric performance, of the character who becomes the movie's center, overshadows much of what the other actors are trying to accomplish. The same goes for the movie's visual effects—seemingly a mixture of computer-generated ones (the eponymous Color and a few animals, such as a blue mantis-like insect and a mutated cat) and practical ones (what happens to the alpacas and the gruesome result of two characters being melded together by the Color). There comes a point at which Stanley's approach is less about the dread of the unknown and entirely about showcasing the effects. There are multiple moments akin to a vibrant but shallow light show, with the flashing and swirling neon glow of the Color, and the gradual psychological decay of the family is bypassed for something more like a geek show—twisted, slimy mutations crawling and screeching and bloodily exploding from shotgun blasts. On a purely technical level, this shift works for what Color Out of Space becomes. The major issue, perhaps, is that the movie—at first, a tale of implied horror—becomes that—a more literal kind of horror show—in the first place. Copyright © 2020 by Mark Dujsik. All rights reserved. |
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