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movie review - Black Crab

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-eight years and a million words

Kokubunji, 2022.04.17

This is a tense tale set in a near future Crapsack World where war has broken out between .. someone. The movie starts in a current-age scene all too familiar to many of us - stuck in traffic. But that abruptly leads to a break-out of gunfire, and from then on - never mind the year - we're in constant armed conflict. Our hero valiantly tries to protect her daughter as soldiers are suddenly sweeping through the space shooting everyone, but for her trouble's she's knocked out.

And then a time-jump of indeterminant duration occurs. It's at least months but maybe years, from the look of things. That look is "post-apocalyptic" mixed with "normal winter in northern Europe".

I'm still a bit shaky on how our heroine winds up where she does (a military base, but possibly a temporary one) and without the daughter she was so earnestly fighting for, but we catch up with her being enlisted for an extremely dangerous mission to cross part of the semi-frozen Baltic Sea on skates. She's to join a band of desperados including someone who abandoned her just moments earlier (in screen time).

It's at this point that the story settles down somewhat but I have to say the entire final act was a bit much after all we've been through at this point. This movie feels like a tricky adaptation of a novel or possibly a series of novels.

Not recommended.

rand()m quote

The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to such a pass that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love, and in order to occupy and distract himself without love he gives way to passions and coarse pleasures, and sinks to bestiality in his vices, all from continual lying to other men and to himself.

—Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov