Viking Night: Heavy Metal
By Bruce Hall
May 29, 2012
With violence. And nudity. And then some more violence.
There. I've literally described the entire plot. It’s not much, but the blanks are filled in by a series of vignettes, each presented Twilight Zone style. And, each is animated by a different studio - which is part of the appeal/distraction, depending on your point of view. The giant ball of evil in question is called the Lok-Nar, a malevolent entity that claims to be the source of all horribleness in the universe. The Lok-Nar has just been retrieved by the world's coolest astronaut, who brings it back from space in a tricked out Chevy as a gift for his daughter, right before it horribly disintegrates him.
And if you think the verb "disintegrate" does not need a modifier, you need to watch the scene.
The Lok-Nar torments the frightened child by telling her a series of stories, each meant to reflect the way evil influences the way we act, and how supposedly powerless we all are to prevent it. We find out that the Girl is the only being in the universe who can destroy the Lok-Nar, therefore it felt drawn to seek her out and destroy her. Now, the observable universe is said to be about 28 billion light years in diameter. It seems to me if you wanted to avoid someone you could just pick a direction, hit Ludicrous Speed, and call it good. But no, the Lok-Nar chooses to seek out the one person who can kill it, murders her father and then mocks her for the next 87 minutes.
Which, interestingly, is what eventually gives her the strength to resist.
Yeah, you can see how this is going to turn out before five minutes are up. The rest of the movie is really just killing time between bookends. Your high school film teacher might decry this as the kind of masturbatory film making that is destroying cinema as we know it. Meanwhile, the World of Warcraft set will hail this as an artistic masterpiece; an ironic anthem of female empowerment where the women wear brass thongs and carry massive, phallic swords BECAUSE they are strong and confident. Not because they’re sex objects.
Honestly, I can see both sides of this - the adolescent inside me is totally okay with supermodels in Marika Vera body armor beheading trolls because...HELL YEAH!. The smaller, more mature part of me knows that this film is largely a jumbled mess of gratuitous violence and raging hormones. In fact, one of the challenges of telling a story in this format is that for the broader narrative to be effective, the individual chapters must connect to each other in clear ways that move everything forward. Otherwise, the experience feels fractured and manipulative. That's my biggest problem with Heavy Metal - the sense of narrative disconnection.
Each vignette more or less deals with the machinations and wages of greed and avarice, deceit and murder. Each occurs in a different, progressively more fantastic setting. Sometimes we’re in space. Sometimes we’re in World War II. And sometimes, they're in another dimension that looks like Middle Earth, if Jim Henson and Hugh Hefner designed it. Unfortunately, none of these vignettes tie together clearly with the others. They’re obviously supposed to, but they don’t. The result is a rather empty visual feast - all terrifically imaginative stuff, unless you're looking for something resembling a coherent story.
Still, there are some genuinely great things about Heavy Metal. film should open with an astronaut streaking from space in a 1960 Corvette with tasty guitar licks wailing from the speakers (just how I planned to show up at my high school reunion). The Harry Canyon sketch is amusing because it's the only thing I can think of for the first 20 minutes of The Fifth Element. The sweetness in John Candy's voice is what gives the third sketch life, and you’re a hard person if that doesn’t make you smile. And the B-17 sketch could only have been improved with the addition of William Shatner and an animatronic gremlin.
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