Resistance

The writers of "Resistance", if the publicity releases are to believed, seem to think they have produced an important "serious" movie dealing with issues of civilian resistance to the military in a domestic security situation.

I'm sorry to disappoint, but the movie was embarrassing and clearly the writers seemed to have done all their research from a naïve student activist leaflet left over from the 1960s.

The heroes are a bunch of feminist workers following some sort of pacifist 'spiritual" resistance, that for much of the movie comprises sitting around in a circle chanting something that might be a distorted version of Kumbayah, wearing some sort of "native" face-paint.

Their opponents are supposed to be an elite counter-insurgency unit sent to pacify this "resistance".

However, this "elite" unit seems to comprise a gang of incompetent, panic stricken neurotics led by a Rambo wannabe, tooling around the countryside in a "specialist" counter-insurgency vehicle that looks like it escaped from a Monster Truck rally. (Believe me, whatever it is, its not something that any half-sane real-life military would even consider using for such duties, if indeed, anything!)

This movie was made by someone who (a) has no idea how real-life resistance movements, armed or passive, actually work and (b) hasn't the faintest conception what real-life police or military security forces look like, are organised or equipped.

It was made either as a satire or a tax dodge........its very silly.

Compare this film with something by Gillo Pontecorvo, and you'll know exactly what I mean.

RESISTANCE is visually an enormous film, MAD MAX 2 and 3 in style and size and made with a fairly healthy budget: $7 million dollars Australian (about $10m USD). It had spectacular set pieces and lots of marauding battling army vs citizens scenes, sort of all ready to go all Braveheart on each other. The post apocalyptic collapse of civilisation theme seemed interesting (again) and many of the MAX movie actors turned up again for duty. But it was never released. No cinema in Australia actually screened the film to the public. Then one week, the producer Pauline Rosenberg hired an inner city art-house and it had a few sessions as some sort of 'write off' season maybe to prove to the now penniless backers that the film saw the arclight and flopped. There is a smelly rat in the production of this film. It cost far too much and I do not even believe was meant to be shown. Plenty of 'fees' gobbled up the production costs and attempts to release it were met with a minefield of dramas, causing every cinema distributor, including myself, to be uneasy about the financial dealings (and dramas to come). Everyone said no and resistance to RESISTANCE was final. However, someone made a lot of money from the production of this film...a sad but common tale of film production in Oz.

As a huge 'Mad Max' fan I wanted to see 'Resistance' for some time and finally got a copy shipped over from the US. It was worth the wait. This is a very good movie, dealing with some big political issues, abuse of power chief among them, with maturity and wit. It is also beautifully filmed and the vastness of the outback landscape really comes across.

It feels almost like a prequel to 'Max' in that there is a stage set here for the collapse of 'civilization' and a return to a more feudalistic society.

I know next to nothing about the political and economic situations in Australia but let's hope that 'Resistance' is exaggerating things. Actually, since I haven't heard about the collapse of civilization Down Under in the seven years since this film was made, I suspect that it does. The "time is now," says the introduction, and the Aussie countryside is depicted as a place where hoards of itinerant harvest workers try to eke out a subsistence living while being squeezed by the agribusiness concerns. The situation has gotten so bad that the government has declared martial law and a state of emergency to combat what it calls terrorism by the workers, the majority of whom we see are women. The environment isn't quite as bad as in the 'Mad Max' films, but it's getting there.

There's lots of exciting action in this movie, which is grim but entertaining, and the filmmakers certainly do bludgeon their message home successfully, if forcefully. It's an effective film, yes, but so was John Milius' paranoid right-wing fantasy from 1984, 'Red Dawn.' Does 'Resistance' have any real currency or is it as bankrupt as the country it depicts? Someone closer to the situation will have to answer that one. All I can say is that as a film I thought it had positive merits.

I was surprised to see that the Australian Film Commission had a hand in this movie since the government's armed forces are for the most part depicted as men who have no qualms about fighting and killing their own countrymen (and women), and in some cases they're made out to be little better than psychotic killers.

Having talked with the director regarding the production of this particular film I am impressed with the ability of the entire production crew to make such a magnificent tribute to the concept of resistance (the title) in the short season they had to get all the filming done in one harvest season and create the realism of human interactions. "Peter" is one of the characters that is particularly well done, the honesty of his reactions and behavior jibes with recognized psychological doctrine and personal experience. All the characters have a honesty to their relations that rings true with such perfect accuracy it sometimes if staggering. Congratulations to all the folks who worked on this fine film.