LANDSCAPE WITH INVISIBLE HAND - Mark Reviews Movies

Landscape with Invisible Hand, MGM

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 17, 2023

At some point in the 2030s, humanity makes contact with an extraterrestrial race called the Vuvv, who arrive on Earth and take over the planet in relatively short time. Their means aren't threatening or violent. It's just that they have the technology to manufacture common resources, and some leaders of business see the potential to make a lot of money and gain a lot of power by allying with the alien visitors. The aftermath of that deal is the focus of Landscape with Invisible Hand, a pretty clever and unique spin on a story about an alien invasion that, unfortunately, doesn't quite figure out what it's trying to do or say.

To some degree, that doesn't matter. Writer/director Cory Finley's movie is more about the consequences of what the world would like look under a kind of planetary monopoly. Its aims are personal, social, and economic, meaning that we follow a couple of families who find everyday life to be a struggle because they're not part of this new Vuvv-based economy.

They live in what was probably once a very nice neighborhood, although now it has become a dumping ground for those above them on the socioeconomic ladder. In case the point isn't entirely clear, those people and the Vuvv are literally above our central characters—living in cities that float in the sky. The screenplay, based on M.T. Anderson's novel, isn't subtle, except in the somewhat frustrating way its plot seems cobbled together out of ideas that emerge for the sake of giving the story some direction, but this allegorical take on what life might like under this sort of capitalistic autocracy probably shouldn't be subtle in the first place.

Our main character is a teenager named Adam (Asante Blackk), a high school student with a lifelong passion for art. From his perspective, the results of the Vuvv occupation of Earth can be felt everywhere and get in the way of just about everything. Adam just wants to paint some clouds, for example, from his backyard, but then, one of those floating cities emerges to block the view.

At school, he and his fellow students are basically indoctrinated in the history, ways, culture, and opinions of their alien overlords, with a virtual, cutesy cartoon version of a Vuvv serving as their teacher. Actual human teachers with human subjects of learning to teach are becoming increasingly irrelevant, and one of those now-irrelevant educators makes a very public show of the despair brought upon the majority of people on Earth now.

Despite that mood, this is mostly a comedy with a few things working very much in its favor. One is a sense of relative realism about this world, because the story revolves around Adam, his mother Beth (Tiffany Haddish), and the teen's new classmate Chloe (Kylie Rogers), whose family was forced out of their home by the Vuvv, ended up living out of their car, and have been invited by Adam to stay in his family's basement for as long as they need to.

The two teens, who like each other a bit more than as friends, decide to broadcast their young courtship to a Vuvv audience. Since the Vuvv have no need for love (They reproduce asexually), the species has become obsessed with watching real-life human romance. It's an easy, albeit a bit creepy, way to make some easy cash. There's a scrappy quality to these characters that comes to define the pieced-together nature of the story, since it's all about how ordinary people try to survive under a system that inherently sees them as expendable, unless they can provide something to the Vuvv.

As for that alien race, they're another major component of the movie's near-success. So many alien designs come across as lazy, just giving us humanoid-like creatures, but the Vuvv most certainly aren't. They're about the shape of a medium-sized dog, have glassy eyes that rise from appendages on their salmon-colored body, and communicate by way of clapping and scraping their front, hardened paddles together. The sight of them is inherently amusing, as is their detached, self-serious attitude, and a couple of seemingly random plot threads more or less work simply because of how much thought has been put into their design and characterization.

That, of course, gets us to the matter of the plot itself, which later involves a lawsuit brought about by a Vuvv, who's disappointed that Adam and Chloe seem to be faking their romance after some difficulties at home, and an admirably absurd episode in which another Vuvv tries to play father in Adam's house. They have certain expectations for what human life and relationships should look like, based on movies and television, and those definitely don't contain someone like Beth, who's neither willing nor able to put up with that kind of nonsense.

The whole narrative is essentially episodic. That isn't an issue on its face, but it does become one as Finley starts looking for some greater purpose or meaning in material that doesn't need it. For one thing, the point of Landscape with Invisible Hand is right there, in the setup of the aliens and the day-to-day hustling of regular people just trying to get by within this world. Moreover, it's tough to take such a silly concept too seriously, no matter how hard it pushes us to do so.

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