Nick Cuse and Damon Lindelof
This isn’t about whether or not this is a good movie. It’s a stupid movie. The premise is that about a dozen people wake up in a forest somewhere and find out, rather quickly, that they are being hunted. They don’t know why and they barely have time to guess. There’s a large box in the middle of a field which contains a pig and a huge array of weapons. But even as they’re choosing their weapons, the hunters start firing on them.
But to understand what’s going on you have to go to the first moment in the film, and then the last moments, so that’s where all the spoilers are, if you’re even interested in this piece of crap. The writers and director have worked on admiral pieces before, like Mare of Eastown and The Leftovers. Damon Lindelof reimagined Watchmen in a brilliant way that brought the formerly forgotten Tulsa White Riot to the world’s attention.
The real villain in this “piece” is corporate political correctness. A group of friends working in this company exchange some texts and one of them says, “At least we have the Manor.” That is an inside joke among these liberal people: Hillary Swank has rented a 3 bedroom house in Croatia which her friends keep calling The Manor. Well right wing-nuts get a hold of these texts and turn it into a conspiracy theory that liberal elitists (New Yorkers of course) are hunting human beings in an unidentified location called The Manor. The corporation fires everyone who was involved in the chat. Now pissed — but pissed, not at their corporation, but at the right wing nut jobs who peddled this garbage — they decide to play it out for real. They do their research to figure out who is spreading these lies; they train for six months (at least Hillary Swank does); then they kidnap and drug all twelve purveyors of fake news. And then they kill them. Except one, Crystal, happens to have military training and did a tour of duty in Afghanistan. She ends up killing all the liberal hunters and then has a showdown with the last one standing: Hillary Swank, where Swank discovers that they kidnapped the wrong Crystal and that, in fact, she’s actually a really smart person because she read George Orwell’s Animal Farm. She kills Hillary Swank and then gets on the plane that brought them all their and says she wants a ride home and “that’s not going to be a problem is it?” To show us that she’s a decent person, which she’s not btw, she has the flight attendant sit down with her to share some tea. The end.
Some people say it’s a satire of “both sides” but I think that engaging in both-sidism and saying one is equal to the other is another of our problems. People who peddle these lies and knowingly spread them are the side that resulted in our almost losing our democracy. The other side is effectively weaker and more thoughtful. The other side (the liberal side) brings butter knives to gun fights, almost always. A perfect example is Chuck Schumer and his inability to get rid of the filibuster which allows a minority party (when they are in the minority that is) to block all meaningful attempts to govern. When they are in the majority they do what they want, including backing an insurrection and allowing a criminal president to get away with multiple crimes and major corruption.
In this movie, the liberals don’t bring butter knives, they bring assault rifles and training. Oh and, a complete lack of morality or empathy. They should have taken their rifles to the company that fired them. But then how do you hunt a corporation?
Anyway people seem to like it. I just thought it was total nonsense.