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THE BELKO EXPERIMENT:
SLAUGHTER IN THE POST-CHRISTIAN WEST
by
Thomas M. Sipos, managing editor [January 18, 2019]
[HollywoodInvestigator.com]
As a horror film,
The Belko Experiment
is highly unoriginal. Its plot structure is a basic horror
conceit: the lifeboat scenario, in which a group of people are
trapped in a situation, wherein, in order to survive, they must
choose whether to cooperate or turn on each other. This basic
conceit appears in Lifeboat,
Lord of the Flies,
and such Twilight Zone
episodes as "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street."
And in many trashy, low-budget
horror and sci-fi films.
In
The Belko Experiment, 80 employees are trapped in an
office building. Metal sheets have descended around the
building, sealing in everyone (something we've seen before
in Dredd,
among other films). They are then ordered to murder two
coworkers. Then 30 coworkers. How they choose the victims is
up to them. But if they don't comply, twice as many will
have their heads explode, due to previously implanted
mini-bombs.
This notion of forcing random,
ordinary people to murder each other was also used in the
Saw
series (among other films).
Who's behind this plot? Some
unknown corporate or governmental organization. Why are they
doing it? Nobody knows. This concept of a faceless
bureaucracy tormenting people for no clear reason is
reminiscent of the Cube
series (among other films).
So, originality is absent from
The Belko Experiment. The film is a decent time killer
for hardcore horror fans. The gore and action scenes are
well made. But this is not a great film. Not a deep film.
Yet, as I was watching, some
observations occurred to me ...
The Belko Experiment
could have been a deep film, with much philosophizing as
characters debated the moral price of survival, and moral
issues such as self-sacrifice, suicide, and being ordered
(upon threat of death) to murder others. The characters
could have debated a lottery, giving rise to a scenario as
in Shirley Jackson's The Lottery.
But there's none of that in this film. No deep dialog.
It led me to thinking.
The Belko Experiment is an unintentional depiction of
the post-Christian West. Eighty people face a great moral
dilemma in Columbia, a once Catholic country. Yet none
of them even once mentions, or appeals to, God, Christ,
religion, or the possibility of reward or punishment in an
afterlife. No one prays.
Naturally, the villains want only
to survive. But even Mike (the film's moral voice) doesn't
appeal to God. He can only advocate ungrounded ethics.
Ungrounded, in the sense of "This isn't right!" --
but without any greater philosophical or theological basis
for his claim. Because of this, his moral appeals are
baseless assertions rather than reasoned arguments. Shallow
and trite.
This is also a very PC film. The
80 people are diverse. Men and women, gay and straight, white, black,
and brown. Yet all
the villains -- those who organize to murder their
coworkers, in order to save themselves -- are white men.
Allof them.
The film is also PC in its feminism.
Overall (if not in every instance), the women are braver,
smarter, and tougher than the men. When Mike insists that
everyone should cooperate, and refuse to kill each other,
his smarter girlfriend, Leandra, tells him that people
aren't like that. That they will turn on each other. Leandra
is proven correct.
Leander is not only smarter than the
guys. She's tougher. She kicks ass, defeating men much
bigger than herself -- even former special ops men --
despite being a petite gal with no training. She essentially
saves Mike's life.
Likewise, the women are braver. When
the villains select people to kill, one woman snarls at a
villain not to touch her, a last stand of defiance before
standing bravely against the wall. Instead, it's a man (a
white man) who blubbers and begs to be spared, having to be
dragged to the wall, before a villain just shoots him in
disgust, right where he is.
The Belko Experiment
is a reflection of our modern PC cultural zeitgeist.
Evil white men. Kick-ass women. Zero Christianity. The
filmmaker likely didn't do this consciously. He more likely
absorbed these PC values, and regurgitated them without
thought. The result on screen is ... not pretty.
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