Neptune Frost

Watching this felt exactly like what it feels like to be the only sober person in a club full of drunk people. If you've ever been a designated driver and had to listen to the cooing and obnoxious behaviors of drunk people, that is the equivalent to what watching this movie felt like. This movie was an incoherent acid trip, but not in a fun way. Unnamed characters, with no dialogue, would look at the camera and have post processing special effects applied to them with the same quality you'd expect in a high school film class. Except the high school film class would at least add dialogue and a coherent plot.

I waited optimistically for this film to make sense. You cling to the hope that, if you suffer through 20 minutes of the oddity that you would be rewarded with something that makes it all click into place. But that thing never comes. This movie remains the same pointless spectacle from beginning to end, except at least in the beginning the spectacle is interesting. By the time the audience makes it 5 minutes into the movie, the visual spectacle isn't even interesting anymore.

Originally premiered at the 2021 Toronto Film Festival and 2022 Sundance Film Festival.

This is the first movie I have seen made in Rwanda (also the United States took part of this project as well) and it is directed by Saul Williams and Anisia Uzeyman and it is about an intersex African hacker, a coltan miner and the virtual marvel born as a result of their union. This movie is pretty strange, but I quite liked it.

Williams and Uzeyman is able to create a weird African musical science fiction type story through strange colorful production designs, weird performances, poetic dialogue, and very strange narrative choices throughout this movie. It felt more like an experience then actually watching a movie about characters roaming around the planet earth. The dialogue is interesting despite some of the wording feels a little fake. But the poetic lyrics and tone helps to keep it from falling. The colorful production and colorful background really helps to keep your eyes glued to the screen. All the performances are strange because I can't tell if they are being good or bad on purpose. Like it's trying to be an experimental still of filmmaking. Almost like something The Weekend would do but this is much more poetic then a The Weekend music video.

I don't often see movies from Africa and there are some really hidden gems in the African landscape. Movies like "Black Girl, Borders (2017), and Lingui, the Sacred Bonds" shows that African cinema is out there but you need to just look for them. I recommend this movie. It's weird but interesting.

Rating: B.

The many themes of sexuality, capitalism, colonization, exploitation all tie up at the end when there's these sort of "lectures" . The music and the unique approach is great!

Neptune Frost is completely trippy. Black codes from the underground meets cloud networks but all expressed as some kind of extended contemporary dance piece.

Parts are simply incoherent but there is always something to look at. It is interesting to have 2 or three characters in the foreground having a poetry recital while in the background there are often dancers interpreting the music that we are all hearing.

There are a number of ideas going on here and I really enjoyed this film as a creative and engaging although the stilted dialogue was a bit too theatrical for its own good.

It was very much like some kind of theatre / contemporary dance piece where the words are clues to the story but not the whole story at all.

I read somewhere that the music was 3 albums worth and when I saw the drummers at the end I was ready for the film to finish so that editing felt like a natural arc. I saw this film at a film festival and I hope it gets wider release. It is exciting and visually and musically very much a success on its own terms. There is a narrative but I think that is secondary.

It seems like everything went into aesthetics with this one. There are really cool ideas and backgrounds and characters, but instead of plot development, we just get a lot of concepts shouted at us instead. This would have been better simply as an album or long music video, in my opinion. I am a huge Saul Williams fan and had hoped for a more complete movie experience.