The Blazing World

MOVIE #1,236 • 🍿🍿🍿🍿 • 11.14.23 Seeing Udo Kier’s name so high on the billing got me super excited for this one. Unfortunately, like far too many of his roles, he’s not on screen nearly enough. This, the debut film by Disney Channel actor turned budding auteur (?) Carlson Young (who also stars), has a glaring digital sheen with intense lighting but it works in the overall false reality that's established. I like the kinda bad special FX too. The movie looks good and really shitty at the same time, if that makes sense. I really tried to will myself to get into this fantasy quest saga loosely based on a 1666 text but the returns are diminishing as it progresses.

I’m not familiar with the source material, which has been read as both a work of proto-scifi and a utopian tale, but there are clearly lofty aspirations here on a thematic level. There's gender politics stuff here that is either incredibly forced or I'm simply not getting (or both), and the penultimate climax gets deep into some daddy issues stuff as well. In the end, it’s a movie about grief. But none of it really works. The film was set up nicely to be this visual spectacle/wandering affair but ultimately it loses ALL focus. The end result is middling and I wouldn't recommend it. Still thinking about this crow randomly dying by repeatedly bashing itself into a wall at the beginning, though…


WHAT DOES IT MEAN, MAN?

---

CHRONOLOGICALLY
⫷ MOVIE #1,235 - (YOU ARE HERE) - MOVIE #1,237 ⫸

---

The Blazing World is a 2021 American fantasy horror-thriller film written and directed by Carlson Young (in her feature film directorial debut) and co-written by Pierce Brown. The film stars Udo Kier, Dermot Mulroney, Vinessa Shaw, Soko, John Karna, Young and Edith González in her final film role before her death in 2019. The film is loosely inspired by Margaret Cavendish's 1666 work of the same name. In 2018, Young wrote, directed and starred in the short film of the same name, prior to expanding the basis and ideas for the full-length film. It is the first in a planned trilogy of films entitled Saturn Returns. It was released on January 31, 2021.