AGGRO DR1FT

2023

★★★

Man oh man, I don't even know. Visions of monstrous skeleton gods and twerking booties are still dancing past my mind’s eye. Contemplated half a star, contemplated a full five, settling on three because whatever I ultimately feel about its beautiful, nauseating, ethereal, and frequently boring cycle of synth soundscapes and infrared images, I think I sorta like it. Harmony Korine's latest is the phantasmagorical skeleton of an assassin story, a nightmare vision of the future of cinema, and a fever dream gamification of visual storytelling and perhaps life itself. World's greatest assassin and all around family man BO wanders through present-day dystopian Florida's flooded streets and waterfront mansions with his life's purpose repeating on a loop: love my family, kill the motherfuckers. Same goes for lead henchman Zion, a nearly catatonic Travis Scott: wake up, do it, wake up, do it, something something Julius Caesar. Same goes for Aggro Dr1ft's angelic luchador-samurai of a final boss, forever cursed to gaze at strippers and hump his sword. Periodically these characters are smudged in AI-generated robotics, a window into the mechanized and algorithmic logic of their world. A good quarter of the remaining runtime is then dedicated to various goons mugging for the camera and firing their weapons into the sky. If levelling any sort of critique even makes sense in this context, it's that these stretches—cinematic analogues to a video game character creation page—grind the little story there is to a standstill. But that might as well be by design? Can't wait for the wide release, and hoping hoping hoping it gets a decent theatrical run.

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