There is no perfect formula for a first scene — art is simply too complex to make such generalizations. The pulsing action of Jackie Chan’s Police Story sets impossibly high expectations that look dumbfounding when he outdoes them later; Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2. would be a lesser movie with almost any other introduction than the playful and energetic dance fight; and, more recently, Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast drops viewers in media res into the very heart of the matter. No great filmmaker shares the exact same philosophy on how to deliver a beginning, but the best of them are archaeological in nature: they require effort, luck, and an awareness to stop digging once you find something that looks like what you’re looking for.
The Fix, a new South African sci-fi film that takes place in a world where breathable air is a thing of Earth’s pastime, opens perfectly. The first scene of Kelsey Egan’s (Glasshouse) second feature shares quite a bit with the onset of Bonello’s aforementioned meta-theatrical cinematic epigraph, though things are considerably less weird and ineffable in the former. But both put the main protagonist in the glare of an in-film camera — a commercial for Lea Seydoux in The Beast, a PR shoot for Grace Van Dien (as Ella) in The Fix — that inserts meta-narrative and symbolic functions onto the fake shoots. Ella’s job modeling for the evil company profiting off the climate crisis opens The Fix‘s most meaningful contribution to the sci-fi space by marrying consumerism to the climate crisis while also doing the heavy lifting to define the film’s dystopian premise. She looks great while doing it, and that’s absolutely part of the point.
Set mostly in South Africa, where the film was also shot, Ella works as a model. When we meet her, she is working on a shoot for the pharmaceutical megacompany Aethera’s new drug that promises immunity to the toxic air. Like modern-day Americans in need of insulin, most people cannot afford its daily dose and instead require masks. Ella may be a model and actress, but she is not alienated from the human cost of labor in the way Aethera’s CEO (Daniel Sharman) is. The second the shoot ends, Ella puts her mask back on; the marketing faces of the drug do not receive its benefits. When she’s not working, she hangs out with a group of dubious friends, and when she finds a blue vial of drugs on the bathroom floor one night, she chugs it without a second thought. Not much time passes before her body starts to morph one alteration at a time and she starts to acquire strange powers, like the ability to climb flat walls or an insect claw-like appendage that pokes out of her forearms. The drug, we receive confirmation later, infuses her DNA with that of a dragonfly only found in South Africa — the only creature known to be immune to the toxic air.
In The Fix, Van Dien walks in the footsteps of Milla Jovovich’s Alice from the Resident Evil series. Of course, the two characters are dropped into similar dystopian worlds with evil mega-companies (Aethera and Umbrella Corporation, respectively), DNA-transforming drugs, and stylized action. Van Dien plays the part with a can-do seriousness and intimidating physicality that Jovovich has been the premier custodian of in genre filmmaking for the past few decades, while also remaining mysterious enough to serve as the kind of blank slate that viewers can project their own realities onto with ease. In this way, the picture lives or dies in Van Dien’s hands, and she steers that responsibility with impressive ease. The writing of Ella’s character (if not Van Dien’s performance) also shares quite a bit with a pair of women in two notable Luc Besson films, ones whose extra-human traits hold secrets that could change the course of humanity: Jovovich as Leeloo in The Fifth Element and Scarlett Johansson’s titular character in Lucy.
The Jovovich reference is also a fitting comparison because the film’s style borrows a bit from that series’ mastermind, Paul W.S. Anderson. Beyond plot conveniences and sci-fi world-building elements, the action combines digital filmmaking tools with real-world physicality in a way that Anderson and very few others successfully accomplish, let alone routinely. Even the cool-guy industrial rock score in The Fix will feel familiar to Anderson-heads. In fact, the overall impression is so distinctly comparable that it’s tempting to think there is something to Egan’s connection with the Resident Evil director since she performed stunts early in her career for the Anderson-produced Death Race 3: Inferno, but this professional connection is so distant that it’s more likely either a coincidence or a natural repercussion of her preference for female-centered genre filmmaking.
Still, that’s not to say The Fix is derivative or devotional to any of its (potential) inspirations, nor to Egan’s previous film that also involves a toxin spread through the air. The minimal yet futuristic look to the world feels closer to the apocalyptic place we might actually be on a trajectory to find ourselves in reality than to the crazy high-tech worlds more commonplace to the genre, as does the fetishization of capitalism and the familiar nuisance of face masks. The production design, which features metal ear pieces and Pokemon-like character evolutions, falls somewhere between cyberpunk and a live-action riff on anime, and the filmmakers seem to have a lot of fun realizing their little world, fun that proves contagious.
Egan’s film comes at a time when climate consciousness is at a high and meaningful change remains negligible. As Andreas Malm drew attention to in How to Blow Up a Pipeline, “Two-thirds of capital placed in projects for generating energy in the year 2018 went to oil, gas and coal — that is, to additional facilities for extracting and combusting such fuels, on top of all that already spanned the globe.” As we become more conscious of the fact that capital is destroying our planet, big business and our governments continue to salivate at destructive paths to profit. The Fix will not, well, fix our climate crisis, and that’s not a responsibility any piece of art can manage. But even though it doesn’t necessarily look it, The Fix is a micro-budget sci-fi film, and this in itself matters. Unlike larger “pro-environmental” films like Avatar: The Way of Water (a film this writer adores despite its flaws), a smaller carbon and pollution footprint comes part and parcel with a smaller budget. Blockbusters that negatively impact our actual planet’s condition cannot, no matter how wonderful the plot’s rhetoric, actually contribute to the environmental cause of combating climate change. It’s renewing to see a film — produced closer to the periphery of global capitalism in South Africa — that functionally challenges rather than reinforces the same paradigm it seeks to critique.
DIRECTOR: Kelsey Egan; CAST: Grace Van Dien, Terri Lane, Clancy Brown, Daniel Sharman; DISTRIBUTOR: Gravitas Ventures; STREAMING: November 22; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 38 min.
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