In the alternate 2008 of Southland Tales<\/em>, America is engaged in World War 3. Following a devastating terrorist attack in Texas, the government expanded the Patriot Act to include full surveillance of on- and offline life. The wife of the GOP’s Vice Presidential candidate runs the surveillance agency. His son-in-law (Dwayne Johnson) is a conservative Hollywood actor who’s gone missing and is now living as an amnesiac with a porn star (Sarah Michelle Geller). A group of left-wing revolutionaries known as the Neo-Marxists have kidnapped identical brothers (Seann William Scott) to help them stage a racially-motivated murder. A weird German scientist (Wallace Shawn) has created perpetual motion energy. Justin Timberlake is narrating it all. And then time travel enters the equation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It’s not hard to see how Kelly thought he could pull this impossible blimp ride of genres and themes off. After all, Donnie Darko<\/em> works, with a tight plot and metaphysical trappings that combine teen isolation, suburban hypocrisy, and a bunny haunting. The scale of Southland Tales<\/em> is far wider than its predecessor, a State of the Nation parable concerned with nothing less than the end of the world. It\u2019s as earnest as Donnie Darko<\/em>, but with the self-conscious camp of contemporary reality TV. Where Donnie Darko<\/em> deftly blends \u201880s high school drama with a mental health allegory of fourth-dimensional magnitude, Southland Tales<\/em> turns the volume up tenfold and yells about its fears. It\u2019s a Fox News bulletin of subtlety and gentleness, much like 2008 itself was.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It’s tough to overstate how Southland Tales<\/em> might be the most<\/em> 2007 film ever made. It is a manic creation of the George W. Bush era, populated by pre-social media teen icons, SNL<\/em> comics, and Bai Ling, all while music by Moby and Muse plays. The villains are Republicans and oligarchs who seem to take sexual pleasure in violating civil liberties. America\u2019s presence in the Middle East is a never-ending cycle of death and trauma. A fitting subtitle for it all would be \u201c9\/11 Broke Our Brains.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n To the extremely game cast\u2019s credit, everyone is committed to the material that few of them likely understood. Dwayne Johnson, before he reinvented himself as a megastar brand, is great as a macho movie-star who turns into a trembling toddler the moment he\u2019s confronted with real danger. Cheri Oteri chews every scene with the kind of manic comedy zeal that made her an SNL<\/em> standout. Seann William Scott wrings real pathos out of some of the most ludicrous lines in modern cinema (\u201cPimps don\u2019t commit suicide!\u201d) It\u2019s a more intentionally funny film than it got credit for at the time, although its aching earnestness cannot help but slide things back into the \u201cunintentional\u201d zone. The presence of these of-their-era teen stars adds a strikingly meta quality to Kelly\u2019s overcrammed vision: why wouldn\u2019t a tale of capitalism and a right-wing cultural takeover be populated by The Rock, Stifler, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer?<\/p>\n\n\n\n One is likely to be driven mad by prophecy. Kelly\u2019s attempt to capture the typhoon of contradictions of his hyper-specific moment in American history only proved how bad things were going to continue to get. While the entire film is imbued with a very pre-Obama liberal feistiness, its ludicrous details are also often bleak as hell: the total lack of privacy under the Patriot Act\u2019s overreach, the racist cops and their crimes becoming viral videos, the mainstreaming of pornography and emergence of the reality TV celebrity, tech bros greenwashing their environmental destruction, and the consequences of nationwide collective trauma. Perhaps it\u2019s less prophetic than it is a mirror of what we all knew was to come. Even Kelly probably couldn\u2019t have predicted a UFC fight taking place at the White House.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In that context, it\u2019s somewhat inevitable that Southland Tales<\/em>, the most post-9\/11, Bush-era spectacle of sound, fury, and dance numbers would be both fascinating and kind of aggravating to watch. It\u2019s like trying to find a cohesive throughline from the ramblings of an intoxicated street preacher, or adapting the words of Nostradamus into a Spike TV series. It asks too many questions and offers zero answers. But how could it do anything else? Consider Southland Tales<\/em> as a progenitor to something like Ari Aster\u2019s Eddington<\/em><\/a>, the\u00a0 COVID Western that exposed how Trumpism and pandemic lockdown helped to birth our era of paranoid brainrot. Being confronted by your species\u2019 idiocy is tiring, but there\u2019s an honesty to it. The conspiracies never had to make sense to get people to believe them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Southland Tales” is available for digital rental or purchase<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/southland2-1024x674.jpg\")
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