★½                 By Z.P. Kibbleworth               August 25, 2090

Of course it had to be this. Of course after six months of moving from bunker to bunker, subsisting most of the time on residue from slop annihilators and tolerating dozens of obnoxiously loud snorers, when things have finally stabilized enough for me to return to my job and see a movie in the theater, it had to be this one. I don’t think there could have possibly been any circumstances more favorable towards me giving a film a positive review. I had been positively starved of the cinematic experience, the only substitute I had for several weeks at one point while bunkering underneath an IHOP in Bowling Green being a DVD of the forgotten 2002 film Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever with Antonio Banderas and Lucy Liu. And so, once Earth’s governments finally got themselves together enough to get the magnetonuclear shield wall back up and running and we could at last return for the moment to something resembling how normal life operates, all I was looking for in my first screening since the war broke out was something to take my mind off the chaos and amuse me a little. I would have enjoyed almost anything. Almost. But we can’t have nice things. And so what I was forced to sit through instead was a grating, lifeless, stylistically infantile piece of propaganda courtesy of my personal tormentor of a director: Rizz Chaddington. Maybe that Ballistic movie wasn’t so bad.

Rizz Chaddington, for those who have been lucky enough to avoid both his work and terminally online fanbase, is the Platonic ideal of a movie director as defined by a thirteen-year-old misogynist. He makes completely vapid films, maximalist as far as indulgence in violence and sexualization of every character go, yet lacking many things we tend to expect in good movies: nuance, wit, skill. What thematic threads can be traced across his work usually amount to glamorizing cruel, unstable men as badass heroes and advocating a return to antiquated gender roles. He is a director whom anyone with intelligence would quickly recognize as shallow and gratuitous. Unfortunately, intelligence has become quite a scarce commodity these days, and so Mr. Chaddington has built quite a following of people calling themselves Rizzciples.

Sergeant Erectus is everything we have come to expect from a Rizz Chaddington film (or, to use his preferred nomenclature, a Rizz Chaddington Smashdown). It focuses on a maverick hero meant to represent the ideal masculine specimen who kills a lot of people, has a lot of sex, and looks really cool the whole time. It features women with no discernible characteristics beyond “they’re sexy” who were evidently cast primarily based on how well their bodily proportions matched those of hentai characters. Like Mr. Chaddington’s previous film Alpha Nuts, it features increasingly contrived ways of getting the main character out of his shirt, here involving at one point the threads ripping apart due to, as far as I can tell, the sheer loudness of a guitar solo he plays while on a spacewalk. (If you’re wondering how a guitar solo can produce any sound in space, you have already put more thought into the film than the screenwriters evidently did.) Like Mr. Chaddington’s other film Me and the Boys on Bloody Sunday, it features Franco DiFuglia in a supporting role doing little more than making veiled antisemitic jokes. This is all par for the course.

What sets Sergeant Erectus apart from Mr. Chaddington’s other work, however, is that it is also a piece of propaganda for Earth in its current war. The film does little to disguise this; its title character at one point dons the Earthling flag as a cape and fights through several dozen Galileans, all set to the music of the Greenhouse Guzzlers. The Galilean characters are depicted as cowardly bureaucrats who for some reason have pointy ears, Sergeant Erectus is a mountain of a man constantly depicted in heroic backlit shots. The brand of propaganda we get in this film is far from the grave alarmism given by the prewar film Burning Sky, rather it is a film that tries to sell the indulgence of massacring in the name of Earth, and presumably hopes it will inspire you to enlist and do the same.

This propagandism, though, is interestingly a source of relief for the endlessly irritating tendencies of the film’s director. Rizz Chaddington’s films have always been about aggrandizing ultra-virtuous (“virtuous” perhaps only in the Machiavellian sense) individuals and their infinite coolness in the face of soft progressivism. But working for the governments of Earth, this program must also be infused with political messaging that supports the war effort. These aims are not as compatible as one might think. To begin with, there is the casting. Mr. Chaddington generally partners with wrestlers or neo-Nietzscheans to play his lead alpha males, but the patriotism of this film demanded something more tasteful (one can hardly fathom the use of that word in conjunction with a Rizz Chaddington film). Instead, the lead role of Sergeant Buddy Erectus is played by former soldier Hogan Flattooth, in an apparent attempt to create a new Audie Murphy. While many would probably consider the casting choice noble, the fact is Mr. Flattooth is just unable to perform the role to the specifications necessary for this type of film. Mr. Chaddington’s heroes need to be effortlessly dominant, able to crack vulgar one-liners and snap necks while looking like this is just another Tuesday. Hogan Flattooth is plainly trying too hard. He possesses none of the charisma required of such a character. His line deliveries are forced, his acts of violence feel procedural rather than badass, and unfortunately for the film, the physicality of an actual soldier simply does not rise to the level of caricature that a professional wrestler can bring. Simply put, Hogan Flattooth looks realistically fit, and in a film like this, that is the kiss of death.

There is also the matter of depicting the United Nations and its military forces in a positive light. Naturally, as a film whose primary purpose is to frame the ongoing war as a worthwhile endeavor and get Earthlings to enlist, it needs to depict the U.N. positively, as the noble guardians of peace and justice. But again, this runs contrary to the core of Rizz Chaddington Smashdowns, which are exclusively about exceptional individuals whose mojo cannot be contained by any existing systems. These characters are meant to assert their dominance by shoving it in the face of authority, in the spirit of the American cop movies at the back end of the twentieth century. In Alpha Nuts, the main character sticks an animal transmogrification implant into a public health worker while he sleeps, giving him a donkey’s nose to emphasize what a pain in the ass he has been. Giving someone an animal transmogrification without their consent is a felony, but these films make it clear the justice system does not apply to people with this much swagger. In Sergeant Erectus, though, the pro-U.N. propagandism demands that this showing up of authority be tempered considerably. Now, amidst all the glory shots of U.N. ships with the oh-so-original musical accompaniment of “Ride of the Valkyries,” we just get a handful of feeble officers that Sergeant Erectus gets to make jokes to regarding his sleeping with their husbands and wives. But this cannot match the impact of a forced donkey nose. Thus the film’s political commitments water down its abrasive ethos.

I did not like Sergeant Erectus, and I do not like Rizz Chaddington’s other films. But in the spirit of magnanimity, I can say this much for the film: Mr. Chaddington’s other work is very good at being very bad. Sergeant Erectus, on the other hand, is bad at being bad. And this makes it, in some small way, less torturous than some of his other films. I would say this is cold comfort for the Rizzciples, but I am quite certain they do not read The Pondering Cosmo Film Desk. In fact, I am quite certain they do not read. They will see this film and worship it and perhaps it will make them enlist to fight and die in the war. In that way, the film might have some positive impact, for this would probably help clean up the gene pool. Either way, what happy accident makes the film slightly more bearable by its own incompetence does not help improve my estimation of it. This is an absolutely pathetic move from a filmmaker who has thrown away his own personal ethos, annoying as it may be, in the service of a war machine. Movies can do better than this. They have to, because if this is all that awaits us as theaters reopen in the midst of this war, I may need to reconsider my line of work.