Boy Kills World
The visual style is extremely well-troden, it has been seen over and over and over again, and they even quote tastefully from the masters. But a story based on brotherly love, two children raised together bonding for life? That’s basically unheard of, it’s fresh just for that fact.
They try to have too many subplots and too many characters, feels like a comic book. The politics of the world are explored, but it’s basically North Korea, just a family-based dictatorship that resulted from a long forgotten revolution. Everyone is just paranoid, going through the motions, while the common saleswoman is none the wiser.
The Boy seems to have been accidentally left alive after his family was all killed, and the resistance leader raises him with a single purpose to kill Kim Jong Un, Silmido-style. He has no tongue nor can he talk, but this is no Silent Night, his inner voice is a sexy H Jon Benjamin. The Jiminy Cricket in his head is his dead little sister. He will go through many videogame inspired “levels” to get to the final boss, but more Dishonored than Street Fighter, as the poster implies.
The first and only outdoor scene is aping the Hunger Games, but the people cheer the fascist goons, that’s simply too realistic. Since this was filmed in Cape Town, Sharlto Copley appears in a glorified cameo.
The inner sanctum is breached, after a TV special of public executions sponsored by a breakfast cereal company, with happy pineapple people bludgeoning enemies of the state. The allied resistance fighters, a very outgoing happy camper, and Batou if he spoke only in nonsense haikus, sacrifice all to get Boy to the elevator and hallway leading to Kim’s house.
Alas, a final twist was required. Turns out Boy is actually the son of the Kim leader. The resistance leader was being murdered with his family, but the Boy was too chickenshit to shoot him, and both fled to the woods. Using a lot of dope and evil psychology, Boy rewrote his memories: die Kim die, family dead.
He was an human weapon, aimed at Kim. His sister is alive, she’s the girl with the motorcycle helmet with the screen on the front. Like an useful version of Apple Vison, it fulfils the same function as Rorschach’s face, visual goodies.
Anyway, his sis remembers how badly treated they were by their mother, flips her off using all five fingers at once, and stick an axe on Famke Janssen’s face, before bolting. Mooks are no match for them, but the resistance leader is the final final boss fight, but they overcome it, barely.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.