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Showtimes London Fri 17 Sep 2021, Prince Charles Cinema, 7 Leicester Place, LONDON WC2H 7BY, United Kingdom, 21:00
https://princecharlescinema.com/PrinceCharlesCinema.dll/WhatsOn?f=19381917
"Prisoners Of The Ghostland"
In the treacherous frontier city of 'Samurai Town', Hero (Nicolas Cage), a ruthless bank robber, is sprung from jail by wealthy warlord 'The Governor' (Bill Moseley), whose adopted granddaughter Bernice (Sofia Boutella) has gone missing. 'The Governor' offers the prisoner his freedom in exchange for retrieving the runaway and to ensure success he’s strapped into a leather suit that will self-destruct within five days. Hero swaggers through a wasteland populated by fearsome gunslingers, lethal swordsmen, vengeful ghosts, and a deranged desert cult. The bandit sets off on a journey to find the young woman, and his own path to redemption.
One of the favorite aspects of 'The Anti-Hero' is that he's essentially a man operating against his own nature; or so he thinks. He's an outlaw who finds himself fighting for justice, a bad guy who finds himself on the side of good. And somewhere within the reluctant struggle, he discovers within himself a person he never expected; a 'Hero'. We also love that 'The Anti-Hero' scoffs at social comfort, he apologizes to no one, explains nothing, and doesn't care one bit about what other people think or feel. The transformation of 'Outlaw' into 'Hero', of 'Captive' into 'Warrior', these flourished in a spiritual sensibility that allows for transformation between demon, spirit, and mortal to occur as swiftly and literally as a cherry blossom flying from a branch. In the intersection of these notions from our youth, there developed the adventure of a man and a woman, each struggling to escape the story of themselves, to somehow outrun or overthrow the definition that the world had fashioned for them, and in the throes of the battle they develop the most unlikely friendship, one of those friendships forged at a moment of reckoning when you witness the soul of the other, for better or for worse.
By the early '80's' the ugly specter of atomic power had become a looming villain of both screen and reality. This was the decade that delivered nuke-obsession films from "The Day After" to "The Toxic Avenger" and everything in between. By the time we hit middle school in the late '80's', activists and entrepreneurs were arguing on the news about where to bury the barrels of molten waste from our short lived nuclear power plants. It's a brazen sin that we couldn't mop up without it smearing all over the place. There's a sweet spot between deadly serious and completely ridiculous that's enticing to storytellers. A world of high intensity and surprising absurdity that many of the cherished action and horror films of our youth alternately frolic and rage within: "The Wild Bunch", "Road Warrior", "Evil Dead", "Conan, The Barbarian", "The Good, The Bad & The Ugly"; these films are the initial inspirations for "Prisoners Of The Ghostland". Think 'Mad Max' trapped in an 'Italo-Western'. "Prisoners Of The Ghostland" is a mash-up of 'Western', samurai, and postapocalyptic thriller. It's a kaleidoscope of upended exploitation tropes, balletic fight scenes, and audacious needle drops. Liberated from genre conventions, the film seems destined to conquer the midnight movie screens.
Using the rather classic, orthodox storytelling of action films, the east meets west world that doesn’t exist anywhere else. The film creates behind all that's distortions of the modern society making real of the unreal world. We believe we're living in an irrational world. The irrationalities we feel everyday are sprinkled throughout in this samurai western film. But an adventure like "Prisoners Of The Ghostland" can't take itself too damn seriously. Or rather, if it's going to take itself seriously, it has to be equally ridiculous. The marriage of the profound and the absurd is a place that we love to go in the storytelling. Artistry and culture pumped psychedelic steroids into each of these early notions that gave birth to the initial script. The unforgivable atomic history between 'America' and 'Japan' cranks up the volume on 'American' arrogance and shameful shamelessness, bringing to the forefront each pulsing wound of things left unresolved. "Prisoners Of The Ghostland".amplifies from a mission statement to a battle cry, bringing along with it the recklessness and chaos of characters with no choice left but to charge through the fire.
