Wasted on the Young

I found it tough to rate this movie. First off, the acting and cinematography are great. The plot idea is superb. There are some great political and social overtones. (Kudos to the reviewer who said this was "Lord of the Flies meets Facebook." That's a great analogy.) It's clear that this is a "Peanuts" world where adults are out there somewhere, but can't be seen or heard. However, if the writers wanted to go that direction, they can't create a world with adults that's totally without them. In Golding's vision, the adults were simply not present. In this world, the adults are there, but totally inert. This ruins the movie in a few ways. I won't give away plot elements here, but there's a fight in the film. It's preceded by a chase through library, halls, classrooms, etc. and students pour out of those rooms. The fight continues unabated until one of the protagonists is defeated and hauled off. Yet no teacher intervenes when students abandon classrooms; nobody appears to halt the fight, help the injured or otherwise restore order. This is rubbish and the plot point could have been written many other ways to accomplish the same purpose.

I'm not giving a rating below 5 because it's not that bad. However, the basic plot and social situations exploited in this film had huge potential... potential I'd have given a 9-10 rating for... yet somehow flopped. Maybe in 10-20 years someone will give another go at this plot. In the meantime, only watch it if your current string of movies-to-see lacks better rated movies.

I struggled watching this a couple times because I hated 95% of the main cast who are all more or less genuinely terrible people and this is obvious from the very start.

The movie deals with bullying and peer-pressure and the characters all felt rather real, plenty of similar characters from my old school for instance, and perhaps that is why it was initially hard for me to watch.

I won't spoil it but the script could have been rather memorable if it hadn't ended up taking a safer route in the end where it should have just hit the gas pedals and made more of an impact but instead it ended up taking a bit of a detour.

Visually it's very much on point though, has some gorgeous scenery and the acting is stellar as well, kind of a 'feel bad'-movie though and yeah it didn't deliver enough in the end for me not to feel that there was an opportunity to do something above average, but the director and script-writer missed it, leaving you a bit unsatisfied.

It's easy to see Ben C. Lucas' first feature, Wasted on the Young, simply as a stylishly directed teen melodrama on steroids and cocaine. In the film, the romance developing between the lovely-but-sassy Xandri (Adelaide Clemens) and the cool-but-geeky Darren (Oliver Ackland) is brutally thwarted by an all-powerful clique of popular kids led by Darren's step-brother Zack (Alex Russell). It is set mostly in either sleek school grounds or drug-fuelled parties, but there is not a school teacher or parent in sight. Early hints of impending violence are realized at a party at Darren and Zack's house, during which tech-savvy Darren prefers to stay upstairs in his room playing violent video games and chatting online, despite Xandri's text messages enticing him to join her. In the wake of the incident that occurs in Darren's absence, the tension and violence rise quickly to a fever pitch, as the popular clique uses technologically enhanced peer group manipulation to suppress their crime, and their victims seek their own technologically enhanced revenge. The twists and turns along the way artfully maintain the tension as the plot unwinds to its conclusion, and the young cast all give great performances, especially the menacing Alex Russell. As a straightforward thriller, the film also offers some easy morals, though the finger wags have been modernized to the era of social networking and cyber bullying.

But although it's possible to watch Wasted on the Young as just a teen-thriller, there is much more to get out of it. For instance, a more interesting way to watch Wasted is as fantasy. Or rather, twin fantasies represented by the two main characters, step-brothers Darren and Zack. One, Zack's, is the fantasy of ultimate popularity, freedom from authority and unrestrained hedonism. The parties in the film may seem unrealistic, the members of the popular clique may be one-dimensional and the power they wield, and the violence with which they wield it, may sometimes be absurd. But that is the point of a fantasy. The other fantasy, Darren's, is the dream of a humiliating and violent revenge shared by anyone who has been victimized by the powerful. Where you find Zack's fantasy, you also find Darren's.

These are common fantasies and the cinema has a long history of indulging them. Revenge fantasies in particular are a favourite of action films, thrillers and, especially, teen films. More and more, our wider culture also indulges Zack's fantasy. The technologies through which we increasingly communicate encourage vapid interactions and the quest for popularity and acceptance — as Zadie Smith recently pointed out, it's not hard to see that Facebook was dreamt up by a 19 year old male. And reality TV shows, perhaps the most Orwellian concept ever coined, indulge our love of popularity contests and our desire to eliminate the unwanted by the sheer force of popular opinion. This sort of fantasy world is the one the characters in Wasted on the Young seem to inhabit, and there are plenty of suggestions that this is what Lucas had in mind.

Seen in this light, Wasted takes just the form it should. The fancy-editing, ultra-slick production and relentless pace make for just the sort of popular entertainment we should think about more critically. It's exaggerated elements — like the violence and drug-taking — and some strange plot features (including the absence of adult interference) are weirdnesses that point to the fact that we're in the realm of wish fulfilment and nightmares. The film's saturation with social networking tools and recording devices isn't a transient comment about those particular technologies, soon to be outdated, but a more lasting observation on how the technologies we use consolidate particular ways of interacting with each other. And while on the level of a thriller the ending may seem over-the-top, it actually works to remind us of the sorts of entertainments we're so routinely offered. In this way it's not unlike the strange, post-climactic scenes of Taxi Driver. The film takes on the form of the fantasy it wants us to think about.

As a film highlighting our various fantasies and the way we, as a culture, indulge them in the cinema and elsewhere, Wasted is by no means unique. The most recent predecessor I can think of is Tarantino's Inglorious Basterds, in which we are offered the ultimate revenge tale — obliterating bastard Nazi's! And in some ways there are parallels between the two films, since Wasted so deliberately recalls so many films, especially cult teen flicks (think Heathers and Donnie Darko to name just two). But Lucas takes the idea in new and interesting directions and uses a tense thriller as his vehicle. It's fantastic to see an Australian film, a Western Australian film in fact, that aims so high and achieves so much.

As a teen thriller, Wasted is genuinely compelling, but if that is the only way it is received then it really will be wasted on the young.

(Full disclosure: I am acquainted with director Ben C Lucas)

I saw Wasted on the Young at its world premiere at the Sydney Film Festival,and it got a strong reaction from the audience. I'm not sure I can say we enjoyed it, because it is a disturbing film in many ways, but it was certainly a highly impressive debut from a rookie team.

A plot synopsis will make it sound like a generic high school movie; cool kids bullying uncool kids, drug-fuelled parties and so on. Halfway through, though, an event occurs which takes us into altogether darker territory and what the director terms "a moral fable".

Technically, the film has many virtues. The bleached-out cinematography, the strikingly shot swimming pool sequences and the nightmarish music/sound design during the party scenes all serve the story well, and are far more ambitious than most Australian movies.

Wasted on the Young shows high school as a horrifying and hermetically sealed environment (I don't think we see any parents or teachers at all), and a cast headed by the impressive Oliver Ackland really convey the tension and conflict of the story.

In a word: intriguing. In a few more, an ardent revenge film that shows substance and style in some areas, but appears to have bitten off more than it can chew in others. This little-known Australian film continues to follow the trend in the local film industry. That is, for every Kenny and Kings Of Mykonos crowd-pleaser released, many more dark and brutal Aussie films fall by the wayside only to be discovered by a handful of people each time, with Animal Kingdom being a noted exception.

The film follows Darren (Oliver Ackland), a nice-enough high schooler who spends most of his time around computers and homework. He is the polar opposite of stepbrother Zack (Alex Russell), whose priority is maintaining a reputation as Mr. Popular. Things take a sinister turn when the shy Xandrie (Adelaide Clemens, a dead ringer for Michelle Williams) is invited to one of Zack's house parties and goes missing for almost a week afterwards. By the time she returns, the school is rife with rumours surrounding her disappearance, and Darren, suspecting his stepbrother and his nasty bunch of friends, decides to find out the truth and punish those responsible.

As mentioned, cinematic style is a big part of Wasted On The Young, and may well be the film's highlight. Unique editing and camera-work during the house party scenes result in an indulgent, but not stereotypical, world that these kids inhabit. It's certainly no accident that the house used is an extremely modern one, full of glass corridors, open spaces and hidden rooms that allow the camera to almost become another character.

Wasted On The Young is rife with themes relevant to today's social landscape. Positively, these themes keep from interrupting each other because of the way they are presented one after the other, compounding the film's message. While it starts out as a critique of social networking, it soon becomes more about what our society may be reduced to in the absence of all authority, where the strong rule and the weak have no freedom. As if that wasn't intense enough, it goes on to pose a more challenging question: What happens when the weak decide they've had enough?

If that sounds like a badly concealed ad, I'll stop now. Because for all the thought-provoking ideas being presented, none of them are really driven home enough to make one think 'yes, that's the message the movie is trying to make.' The fact that it is set in a private school leads to a lack of realism regarding the whole 'no authority' angle, but once you make the connection that the setting only exists to support the metaphor, the film becomes a little more immersive. Other moments, including the climax, completely remove the moderation and consistency from a film that had remained fairly grounded in believability until that point.

The film could have dropped below the ninety-minute mark by cutting out a lot of gratuitous and unnecessary fluff during the Third Act. Fights and arguments among secondary characters were clearly included to both resolve character arcs and build the severity of the climax, but all they end up doing is ruining the pace and prolonging what has become a forgone conclusion by this point.

Nonetheless, in a choice simply between 'go' and 'don't go', I say 'go', if for no other reason than to make up your own mind on this ambitious endeavour.

*There's nothing I love more than a bit of feedback, good or bad. So drop me a line on jnatsis@iprimus.com.au and let me know what you thought of my review.*