Review of Upstream Color (2013) by Statlerwaldorf — 28 Oct 2015

There is more "A Topiary" than "Primer" in "Upstream Color", but one of the wonderful things about Shane Carruth is that he is as original as he is resourceful, so there is nothing retreaded in anything he does… other than time, I guess.

When "A Topiary" was cancelled, those watching for it on the horizon were sorely disappointed. Was it his "Don Quixote"? His "Dune"? It’s kind of hard to tell from the script.

What we can say about the movie we did get is that it’s good, no magnum opus, no revolution, but good and really **** interesting. The main problem with Carruth runs counter to the scifi status quo.

Most scifi creators share a frontal lobe brain disease that impinges their self-control around neat ideas to the extent that they cannot help but blow their creative loads on a concept by drowning it in unimportant and superficial details.

Mostly people create fantasy, in space; or, in the future; or, on scorched earth. Ideas remain childish, their greater implications self-consciously mapped in awkward pseudo-science soliloquies or outright ignored because the scifi elements are just there for pageantry.

Carruth, conversely, has a frustrating level of self-control. With "Upstream Color" he introduces like nine different amazing scifi elements, each worthy of its own film or TV show, but then completely walks away from any attempt to explain them or milk them for thrills.

It’s an amazing and infuriating talent. The movie itself is a meditation on ideas like cyclical and interdependent systems, individuality and memory, evolution and community, good **** It does this with careful pacing and wonderful attention to both the auditory and visual experiences of the viewer, and it leaves you stewing on all that indefinitely, because there are no definites in any part of this film.