ejonconrad

I'll skip the "no true Scotsman" discussion of whether these people were or weren't "anarchists", because they were mostly the run of the mill people who never recovered from reading Atlas Shrugged (pseudonyms like "John Galton" and "Juan Galt" are a pretty big clue) and set out to found a libertarian Utopia, this time by starting an annual "Anarchapulco" conference in Acapulco, which they decide - in spite of the staggering murder rate - is "safer than anywhere in the US".

It was the brainchild of the fantastically narcissistic and annoying Canadian tech bro Jeff Berwick, who's the kind of guy you could imagine mansplaining the blockchain as a pickup line.

It's not clear he ever really believed in anything except not paying taxes, making money, and building a cult of personality around himself, but he managed to convince a lot of people to join him.

The filmmaker made this documentary real time, starting from the first Anarchapulco Conference. It was just "luck" that things got spiced up with a murder and a violently insane stalker, but it was always destined to fail, for the same reason ALL libertarian utopias fail; namely that - Ayn Rand's beliefs notwithstanding - these sort of people don't tend to get along with each other, and things devolved into infighting and splinter conferences that had little or nothing to do with their original goals.

The only truly sympathetic character is Lily (not her real name) who had a truly horrible childhood and then ended up fleeing to Acapulco with here boyfriend to avoid potentially spending decades in prison in Ohio for drugs that are now legal in Ohio. She really is a true believer in anarchy, or whatever it is they claim to be doing, and her journey becomes the central thread of the story, and is genuinely moving.

Like most miniseries documentaries, it could have been shorter, but it definitely held my interest, albeit largely through schadenfreude.

Post apocalyptic movies are probably my favorite genre, and I love Michael Shannon and Tilda Swinton, so I was really looking forward to this movie. I also like musicals, but I did have my doubts about whether the two genres could mix.

Maybe they can, but not this time, because as a musical, it's *absolutely terrible*. The songs are so generic and bland that you forget them the minute they end. Seriously, I watched this last night and can't remember a single song. Michael Shannon does have a surprisingly good singing voice, but Tilda Swinton sounds pretty much exactly like you would expect Tilda Swinton to sound, and that's not good.

Setting the music aside, it's a pretty mediocre story. It's about a family and a few others living an "idyllic" life underground after some sort of never specified apocalypse. Things get shaken up when a newcomer arrives, and then.... well, not much happens. Certainly not enough to fill two and a half hours.

I'm glad I watched it on Hulu rather than wasting money at the theater.

This is an interesting story, but this series suffers from both padding and laziness.

First of all, not EVERYTHING needs to be a miniseries. This story could have easily been told in a 90 minute one-and-done documentary.

So you would think that be stretching it out to a four part series, they'd be able to do a deep dive into the details. Nope. You basically learn everything important in the first episode, and after that, they just keep looping over the same people, occasionally adding a new one, but never really fleshing out any interesting details.

For example, my wife is a nurse, and the first thing she asked was how she managed to fake so many pictures from inside hospitals. That's never even discussed. They also never really talk about the specifics of how they built the case against her.

When the final credits rolled, we looked at each other and said, "Is that it?"