[Movie Review] The First Purge (2018)
Plot Summary: After the rise of a third political party, the New Founding Fathers of America, an experiment is conducted, no laws for 12 hours on Staten Island. No one must stay during the experiment yet there is $5,000 for anyone who does.
Director: Gerard McMurray
Writer: James DeMonaco
Runtime: 1h 38min
Main Cast:
- Y'lan Noel as Dmitri
- Lex Scott Davis as Nya
- Joivan Wade as Isaiah
- Mugga as Dolores
Review by: Mia Roundtree
Thinking about The Purge franchise always makes me sigh. With The Purge (2014), we are given a concept that takes the worst characteristics of humanity and piles them into politics and social experimentation in a way that, conceptually, I cannot help but find intriguing.
When the first of the films released in 2013, I was expecting horror that mixed the suspense of “home-invasion” thrillers films like Hostage, “hunt and escape” thrillers like A Perfect Getaway, with torture and terror that has grown popular with films like Saw and Hostel. The film doesn’t necessarily disappoint and does a fair job of giving us the backstory on the society that allows something like The Purge to happen while also portraying how citizens are directly affected by the social experiment. The Purge is about what humans will do when given complete freedom to be violent. More specifically, this film franchise explores the effects of deregulating violence entirely and promoted government-backed violence within a society built with the social and political tensions that America has acquired since its birth. This theme stays true through the next three films.
The story behind The Purge is force fed to us over the course of three movies which explore the politics of a world where violent release is encouraged once a year, glorifies death as necessary in escaping the sickness within those who enjoy purging (either by dying or by killing purgers), and entertains with mystery and violence. I have kept up consistently with the franchise and cannot deny that its corniness will make you grit your teeth. Its glorifying of violence and terror are both off-putting and entertaining. You want to root for the characters just trying to survive the psychopaths who come out of the shadows once a year to be their most murderous selves. The First Purge is no different in the formula it takes to present this social experiment to its audience. However, it does elect to highlight a more interesting underlying theme of the Purge series: the government as perpetrator and politics as bounty.
When watching the trailer for The First Purge (2018), we are told that this film will take us back to the very first time that The United States allowed The Purge to happen. Staten Island will be its location, its participants will be individuals interested in making a profit for choosing to stay on the island during twelve hours of culling. The rules are the same ones that we are introduced to in the previous film:
“The Purge is a 12 hour period from 7pm to 7am during which all previously criminal activity is now legal. The emergency services (police, EMTs, etc.) are suspended. The only exceptions are that government officials of “rank 10 or higher” cannot be harmed and you can only use weapons below “Class 4”. This rules out WMD. People who don’t follow the rules of the Purge are executed. The Purge is supposed to be a cathartic experience for the citizens of the USA, allowing them to vent any aggression and frustration they might have on that one night. As a result, the rest of the year they would be relatively calm.” (Plot Pendant)
In this film, The Purge is still a trial experiment not yet enforced across the entire nation. The political party in power, known as the “New Founding Fathers of America,” endorses a violent catharsis proposed by Dr. Updale, a practicing psychologist and “Architect” of The Purge protocol and secure Staten Island as the first attempt at solving America’s problems with violence. Ingenious, right? America has never tried this before…
The film begins, Staten Island is preparing for The Purge to begin. We meet several residents of the island and get to know their social standing within their communities, be it criminal, drug addict, community advocate, or lost youth. All of these individuals plan to stay the night for their own motivations, and all of them are in for a crazy encounter when The Purge goes from quiet deregulation to militant extermination in the course of a few hours.
What I Liked:
Surprisingly, The First Purge does its very best to give compelling combat choreography and realistic reactions to weapons and gun spray. The plot tries to explain away all of the different questions we might have about how people acquire weapons so easily, why people are such murderous psychopaths only one night of the year, and how the government documents and records the success of The Purge Protocol. Despite the continued cheesiness of the film, the directing and cinematography pretty consistently provide jump scares, smooth transitions between events, and compelling trailing of characters through high-tension developments. No matter your opinions on this film, it does deserve a nod to its efforts to be a well-structured and well-paced action film.
The Purge is largely metaphorical and self-reflective. It holds a mirror to the worst parts of humanity. The First Purge goes a step further to politicize this corrupt side of humanity and accurately depict how our most corrupt use power and perception to gain ground on political platforms we might normally support otherwise. The film is also fairly unapologetic about acknowledging how a government regulation/protocol like The Purge would affect urban communities. Minorities and lower class families would be most affected by the violence as well as the most defenseless. They would have to rely on banding together, ideally with even their most frowned upon members of their community (gangs, for example), in order to survive. Personally, I can’t shake the idea of a community’s violent and self-serving gun-wielding hustlers switching their hostility from their own communities to a shared enemy. Gives off an urban cowboy feel…cheesy but entertaining.
What I Didn’t Like:
The defining elements of what makes The Purge inevitably allow glorification of behaviors that we shouldn’t be desensitized to. We scoff at police brutality, cheer for the gory death of an irredeemable character (or five), and encourage otherwise docile individuals to pick up weapons and solve disagreements with death. As one of “The Three” puts it in this film, Staten Island is the first American Gladiator arena, where America’s problems are resolved with the blood of gladiators and slaves, and we have to figure out who is which through all the violence.
The answer is that we must all be slaves to a violent culling protocol. Those who are safest will always be those with the most power or the most money or both. Thus, every film will just be chaos porn where poor or defenseless men, women, and children are hunted to their deaths or near deaths for our entertainment. These movies remain cheesy. We see the average neighborhood drug dealers turn into super combat ready militia throwing knives and shooting trained mercenaries like they’ve been doing this their entire lives. We see characters smart enough to understand the danger of The Purge turn down the protection of their more familiar (romantic) connection’s offer for protection because criminal as if the nuances of crime and humanity aren’t much more complex than that in most hoods. The film tries to make sense of a world where we know death and destruction are wrong, but still, we invite it in as entertainment.
My least favorite element of the film was the unrealistic survival of Dmitri (Y’lan Noel). Bullets literally fall from the sky at one point, slaughtering a half dozen people, and he comes out unscathed. He takes a Raid Redemption-esque hike up fourteen floors of weapons going off and doesn’t obtain a single scratch. Please tell me how? He also appears to be military trained and Black Ops grade without us ever knowing until it’s useful. Enjoy the movie, but make it make sense.
Summary
Plot armor keeps characters like Dmitri alive, settling the audience into the idea that this character is untouchable no matter what goes down. It makes for a good few action sequences where we get to comfortably watch him tear apart his enemies with only the worry that someone else might die while he’s traveling across the city dancing through bullets and tear gas. The film rounds off the series well, allowing us a thorough understanding of how The Purge managed to become a tradition in America, but the film fails at providing useful focal points to really provide depth to this America. Why do we never witness the reactions of anyone outside of The Purge? If this is covered heavily on the news, why not show us Belgium’s reaction to this America? The plot could have benefitted from more time on the outside looking in. The film succeeds at being action-packed but does not redeem the series as a whole from being superficial allegory capitalizing heavily on the political climate of real-world America as it sees fit each reiteration of the plot. I’d suggest watching it, especially if you’ve never seen any of the others and enjoy a good acknowledgment of American Strife through retribution.
User Review
( votes)Images Courtesy of IMDB
