By Dustin Rowles | Film | October 8, 2024 |
By Dustin Rowles | Film | October 8, 2024 |
Sometimes, a movie goes over your head, and you use the Internet to find an easy-to-understand explanation. Other times, a movie is so incoherent and ridiculous that it defies explanation. You’re not dumb—you don’t understand it because it’s not explainable. The movie is dumb, and trying to explain it is not only a fool’s errand but gives more credit to the movie than it deserves. It’s like when the NYTimes “sanewashes” a rambling, incoherent Donald Trump speech, presenting the part where he claims sharks are swimming in the bathtub with migrants and drinking wine with Hannibal Lecter as if it’s his forward-looking economic policy for taming inflation.
The Platform 2 is like one of those bad Trumpian speeches. It’s messy, all over the place, and suggests some cognitive decline, but trying to explain it isn’t helpful. Occam’s Razor would tell us that this movie defies explanation because it’s just plain bad.
I write this as someone who enjoyed The Platform for what it was: a straightforward horror film about capitalism. It was simple: A chef put a lot of delicious food on a platform, and those on the top floors could either gorge themselves or save some for the lower floors. It had all the subtlety of a swift kick to the kneecap, but it was entertaining and horrific in its simplicity as one man, Goreng (Iván Massagué), tried to revolt against the system.
There might have been an interesting concept at the core of The Platform 2, but director Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia quickly loses the plot. I think that The Platform 2 may have started as a satire on the flipside of capitalism: a sort of Marxist dictatorship or theocracy. They are so obsessed with fairness that the leaders of this system torture and murder those who break the rules. Sometimes, they even punish those who fail to prevent others from breaking the rules. It’s less about the greed satirized in the first film and more about the corrupting nature of absolute power.
But all that falls by the wayside quickly as Gaztelu-Urrutia decides to overcomplicate things. There’s a big twist, for example, revealing that The Platform 2 is a prequel. That shouldn’t be a twist. That should be the first thing we know because it might make the rest of the movie somewhat more coherent.
We also learn that The Platform is apparently set in space. There are scores of kids trying to climb a slide—although that may or may not be real. And our lead in this film, Perempuán (Milena Smit), wants to atone for a past mistake, which she does by instigating a fight between two factions and hiding among the corpses during clean-up. From there, she saves one of the kids on the slide, but in the process, dies herself and ends up in some kind of afterlife. As in the first movie, it’s all about the lead characters sacrificing their lives for the children.
That’s it. That’s all there is to it. I could indulge in a lot of speculation to make better sense of it, but again: The Platform 2 doesn’t deserve it. It’s not a good movie, it doesn’t know what it’s trying to say, and it’s lost up its own ass. That’s the long and short of it.