Movie monsters have always symbolized our hidden fears and desires. It\u2019s impossible to dissociate the hulking behemoth of Godzilla from the atomic bomb and Japan\u2019s perception of the good ol\u2019 U.S. of A. Bela Lugosi\u2019s Dracula represented our fear of foreigners in the early \u201830s; the pod people of 1956\u2019s Invasion of the Body Snatchers<\/i> our fear of conformity or Communism; the Thing From Another World<\/i> (1951) our terror at advancements in technology. These perceptions change over time \u2014 the Gill Man of 1954\u2019s Creature From the Black Lagoon<\/i>, a horrific hybrid of man\u2019s primitive and modern sensibilities, can transform into the sympathetic outcast of Guillermo del Toro\u2019s 2017 feature The Shape of Water<\/i>;Francis Ford Coppola can change Dracula into a representative of the exotic mystery man. Warner Bros.\u2019 new creature feature, Rampage<\/i>, walks the same road as its brethren before it, using the monsters (and the villains at the center) as thinly veiled allegories to our own current political regime. <\/span><\/p>\n Based on the video game of the same name, Rampage<\/i> follows hulked-out animal trainer Davis Okoye (played by Dwayne Johnson) as he attempts to save his albino gorilla friend George after he\u2019s been exposed to \u201cgenetic editing\u201d and is growing at an alarming rate. George and the other genetically altered creatures are pulled into events through forces outside their control after a spaceship, carrying test samples of \u201cweaponized DNA,\u201d crashes to Earth. What they\u2019re exposed to is controlled by a malicious energy company called Energyne whose goal is to create weapons for military purposes. George represents the sleeping giant, drawn to aggression as a means of survival. It\u2019s the ultimate manifestation of the adage \u201cnever poke the bear.\u201d The movie presents a literal upset of nature, one that has long-term consequences and massive destruction. As Dale Doback says in Step Brothers<\/i>, \u201cWhen you oppress people, they rise up in a fiery anger,\u201d and that\u2019s what the creatures in Rampage<\/i> do. George and crew stand in for a variety of different issues in the U.S. today, from the masses protesting gun-control to the rising antipathy towards immigrants. Or are they just everyone currently feeling like the world has gone mad and we\u2019re an inch away from a nuclear bomb \u2014 or a giant flying wolf \u2014 killing us all? <\/span><\/p>\n Davis and the rest of the human cast members are \u201880s stereotypes (fitting, as the game was released in 1986). In \u201880s action-adventures, men were men, and governments (usually foreign) were the enemy. With that in mind, Rampage<\/i> looks not toward distant horizons but inwardly. So the \u201880s-esque commandos rocking scars, Mohawks, and big guns are presented as wildly ineffective and downright stupid in their underestimation of the situation. They\u2019re big, dumb bohunks who end up turning into wolf chow. The rest of the military men in Rampage<\/i> are equally unaware. Large-scale military forces fail to understand that emptying a clip into these creatures doesn\u2019t work, and more often than not random bystanders could be dying from indiscriminate gunfire. When Davis and Dr. Kate Caldwell (Naomi Harris) attempt to explain the situation to a government liaison in Chicago, the man\u2019s response is to send them away. The government would rather bomb Chicago entirely and contain the situation than listen to experts who offer a peaceful resolution. <\/span><\/p>\n Davis, Kate, and rogue government agent Russell (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) end up working together. (A rogue agent working to unveil a conspiracy? Are we sure Russell shouldn\u2019t be named Mueller?) The creatures aren\u2019t the villains from an audience standpoint. The true evil is in the sister-and-brother founders of Energyne, Claire and Brett Wyden (Malin Akerman and Jake Lacy). It\u2019s so easy to deduce who the Wydens are that you\u2019re surprised their names aren\u2019t just Clavanka and Ron, Jr. Like her real-life counterpart, Claire is a calm, cool woman who wears A-line dresses and has impeccably straight hair. She takes care of her brother\u2019s screw-ups and has no problem acting evil in private while presenting a straight (and helpful) face to government officials. Brett, as the Donald Jr. surrogate, is a polo-shirted bumbling idiot who has only made it through life based on his associations with Claire. He has no intelligence or business sense. Driving the point home, Russell tells Brett, \u201cSince when is complicity a crime?\u201d a stabbing critique of our current White House brother\/sister duo. <\/span><\/p>\n Rampage\u2019s<\/i> critiques aren\u2019t new. Fifties sci-fi and horror were all critiques on the fear of Communism, and with the \u201880s back in a big way, it\u2019s unsurprising how Rampage<\/i> attacks the era\u2019s mentality of \u201cshoot first, ask questions later.\u201d In the \u201880s a big, strong man was all you needed. Today, there are more factors at play and Rampage<\/i> envisions a world of cooperation, a unification between creature and average Joe. Film is part of the dialectic which fuels our culture. Our culture fuels how directors approach films. It\u2019s impossible not to see Rampage<\/i> as a criticism about our current government and vice versa. Rampage<\/i> won\u2019t go down as a classic in the creature feature canon, but it makes you think far more than it should. <\/span><\/p>\n Movie monsters have always symbolized our hidden fears and desires. It\u2019s impossible to dissociate the hulking behemoth of Godzilla from […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":467,"featured_media":9180,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1381,1400],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9179","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-movies","category-on-the-marquee"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9179","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/467"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9179"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9179\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9180"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9179"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9179"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9179"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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