This delivers another tripped-out feat of movie gamer madness within Baby Invasion, more gloriously touching and less dry than AGGRO DR1FT, authored by a quite iconoclastic filmmaker – Harmony Korine. Only Miami this time, in the process of pillaging the hoods, insomuch as the violence mayhem of the Florida sun was harsh.
DR1FT was a capricious assassin movie bonkers, where shock images were washed and dumped over and over again until they formed the beautiful images of addiction. Invasion does not abandon the narrative method, rather it switches the aesthetics, blurring the lines between precisions of the very definitions and concepts of cinema and video gaming till the viewer cannot tell if he is witnessing one or the other. And just in case you didn’t get that, onscreen titles come up at some point saying: Don’t worry this is not a movie and vice versa; this is a game and more importantly this is real life, and there is no such thing as real life. All clear now?
Those people who are looking for Korine’s latest in hopes of seeing an entertaining romp where babies conquer Miami Beach should be warned: Unless you consider the diaper-clad criminals wearing baby masks as babies, there are none to be found here. The twist, however, is that they are also playing a game at that time, which means that in real life, they can turn their imaginary criminal pursuits into wins and in return, earn money in a less imagined world.
If that is still unclear, it does not matter. Korine could not care less whether the audience understands everything or not. What matters is the action-packed experience that Baby Invasion is. There are layers upon layers of images: a live-commentary and cosplays, computer graphics bunnies and all sorts of bizarre lucid artists’ depictions – an extensive Japanese text. The images are complemented by very moody soundscapes and fast-paced beats courtesy of British electronic artist Burial.
Say, it is quite enjoyable for roughly the first ten minutes but like the DR1FT movie it soon degenerates into a dulling exercise in repetition. It is one thing to be actively engaged in a video game, which is practically always the case, and totally a different ball game to sit down and watch a video game. That being said, it is clear Korine is onto something here given that currently millions of people are entertained watching others play video games on Twitch or YouTube.
While it does not possess any sheets, Baby Invasion, as a film, can be divided into three chapters, framed before and after with an interview of the game designer whose last game -the one that was either called baby invasion or baby invaders – grew big in real life. Then we follow a group of players who belong to a bigger group of Duck Mobb who get armed with different types of assault weapons, lock and load, and drive off in a menacing white van to cause trouble.
The other part of the film comprises two home invasion scenes, both aimed at colossal Florida mansions where the invaders successfully turn them into rooms filled with blood of billionaires. Not that the violence is really graphic: There are a lot of guns but not a single shot is fired and baby faced robbers who wear masks spend more time terrorizing owners of the house for cash and less for irrelevant activities like taking pictures and eating a big bowl of fruits.
There are issues at play in this film concerning the poor robbing the rich, and it is worth noting that this was already present in the Spring Breakers but here it becomes much more purer. We have seen how a hardwood court is quite a great feature of a mansion when the robbery takes place in a huge well equipped house complete with perhaps one of the regions most astonishing private pool (the largest in South Florida I searched this) and one of the tackiest interiors seen in recent years traditional design, and it actually seems logical.
What gives him pleasure instead is knowing that this ragtag group of video criminals will ultimately and happily exterminate these establishments pouring blood on the floor while completing tasks in order to gain score in the web. But then, their surges of enjoyment do not appear to be compulsive, and what at first in a short did a nice job of feeling fresh does not extend well into the length of a feature. Baby Invasion, ultimately, is less a game, or a film, or neither or both, than a kind of event doctored up by Korine in the style he is known for.
There are some images in the film which are quite captivating especially in the theater. However, over a period of 80 minutes these shots begin to loose their novelty. After baby invasion, which is largely filmed with what appears as body-cams, the result is a distorting fisheye view into the mayhem. Other shots are made with home security camcorders, by the way: ordain a deep thought, why the bloody hell do these multimillionaires in Florida have no decent security systems or panic rooms.
The mass, what screen offers at once is so great it’s utterly impossible to catch every single aspect so as to hear something like this coming from a voiceover who just throws random lines into the mix: “The rabbit knew he had been blessed,” and the worst, “He felt on the wind.” Is all of this stuff a poetics or a mere show? So once more: Baby Invasioners are neither one nor the other, and it is easy for delusions or opposites break montages.
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