Mark Reviews Movies: MAD GOD

Mad God, Shudder

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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 9, 2022

Writer/director Phil Tippett's Mad God isn't about its story, which exists, to be sure, but doesn't exactly fit into some easy-to-describe mold. It's about a wanderer or a soldier or, as the character is described, an assassin, who comes down from the sky and makes his or her or—for all we know based on what the movie shows us—its way through depths and layers of a dystopian world.

What is the Assassin doing? We find out eventually, and it involves a suitcase that the character carries around through all of his adventures. Why is he doing it in the first place? We never learn that detail, which is how this movie can be said to have a story, although it would be a stretch to suggest it possesses a plot.

Yes, the Assassin and maybe, later, a second assassin have a goal, and the character or characters move from one location to the next. Along the way, they encounter but easily bypass obstacles, see many threats but mainly only witness them and their ways, and constantly move forward toward a destination but never make that place or its significance clear.

There's no dialogue in Tippett's screenplay, save for some grunts from a mysterious man (played by Alex Cox) who lives far above the wreckage of the world, some growls and screeches from an assortment of odd creatures, the uncharacteristic goo-gooing of a Big Brother-esque figure on a giant video screen, and the crying of a human baby emitting from a newborn worm with strands of wiry hair covering its slithery body. Tippett's approach to storytelling in this and just about every regard of his mostly hand-made movie, a mixture of impressive stop-motion animation and key sections of live-action, is almost aggressively opaque.

We can see everything that's there on its grimy, slimy, muddy, bloody, gooey, and gory surface, but it's more or less impossible to see through those elements to the core of its intentions and meaning. That's almost certainly intentional on the filmmaker's part, so we have to deal with it.

If a plot definitely doesn't matter and the story only matters in that it exists on a minimal level, what is the point here? That's pretty simple: It's for Tippett to present this world in all of its dirty and oozing glory, as assembled by him and a relatively limited team of designers and animators. It is a marvel, to be sure, especially in knowing that most of it is made of hand-crafted miniatures, models, and puppets.

There's also a slight thrill in seeing evidence of the process—in the jittery movements of both the figurines and the camera, as Tippet and the crew manipulate the characters, entire sets, and other effects in between each frame here off-camera. Some of the figures, particularly the first Assassin, are so detailed that, at times and because of the intricate lighting, one might wonder if Tippet is cheating with an actor in the character's costume. The shaky camera motions and close-ups of slight warping of the Assassin's boots make it obvious that no such cheating is occurring, and when Cox and some other actors appear later on in human form, it's almost as if they're here to prove and remind us of how much the designers and animators actually did to convince us of the illusion.

One of the downsides of the presence of those actors is that it feels as if Tippett is actively cutting some corners—not only in technique, but also in the realm of this story. What we first witness, in an extended sequence that's entirely animated and repeatedly shows off the dark depths of the filmmaker's imagination, is the Assassin, being lowered in a canister from the sky, past some turrets on a tower, and deeper through a pit in the ground. The vessel, with a bright light shining through a single porthole, passes through layers of rock, below dinosaur fossils and into an underground realm of wild monsters and some increasingly twisted forms of civilization.

Some of the movie's most potently cynical imagery comes during one scene, which follows the life cycle of some faceless, golem-like beasts of burden. They are forged from ash in a mold, do menial tasks and filthy jobs (cleaning the hindquarters of the monsters whipping them), fall into a fiery pit to fuel the machinery of this society, and are randomly pummeled to dust by all sorts of dangers.

The sequence establishes a repeated pattern of isolated scenes and the general narrative here, in that everything and everyone in this futuristic world is without worth, disposable, and—in the best cases, perhaps—recyclable. After the first Assassin is captured and becomes fodder for a lot of grisly surgery, another one, sent down by Cox's mystery man with long fingernails, finds himself/herself/itself within a warzone, and if industry and combat exemplify that central nihilistic idea, another subplot—relatively speaking, of course—gradually puts that notion into the realms of science, the natural world, and the very cosmos.

It's a lot coming out of a story that offers little, and with those shortcuts, it starts to feel as if Tippett is stretching the narrative and the technique far too thin. Mad God is undeniably impressive as a piece of world-building, but that, unfortunately, is where the movie's impact ends.

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