Planet B (2024) Movie Drinking Game
Take a Drink: every time somebody insists they didn’t kill anyone
Take a Drink: for every mention of an expiration date
Take a Drink: for technospeak
Do a Shot: whenever the characters transverse worlds
By: Henry J. Fromage (Two Beers) –
It’s not hard to spin up a totalitarian dystopia from any governmental foundation. We pretend like the far left and the far right are opposite ends of a straight line, but when push comes to power shove, it’s more like a full circle with both poles touching where freedom dies.
Planet B is set in a near future dystopian France, where Euro-liberal ideals have found their way to this illogical end. A group of eco-warriors push back against a government that namechecks some rights while suspending others in novel ways. When they find themselves in a new kind of prison, they’ll need some kind of miracle to survive.
A Toast
Writer/director Aude Léa Rapin packs her film with lots of ideas- from scannable contacts with expiration dates for immigrants to the virtual prison that may look like paradise but is anything but. This is all symptomatic of an authoritarianism that namechecks France’s famously liberal human rights (like the promise that “you will not be observed” in this prison), which all goes out the window I guess when they get a chance to royally fuck with the inmates’ minds. There’s no doubt this is an innovative punishment, and as the hallucinations the prisoners are being subjected to ramp up, an effective one.
Two women between them hold the key to any hope of freedom. French superstar Adèle Exarchopoulos is the one who refuses to crack, despite her personal nightmares being peppered with the very real, if accidental, consequences of her resistance. Souheila Yacoub is an Iraqi immigrant whose visa is about to expire who is a cleaner at a extremely locked down government facility. When she steals a headset in hopes of pawning it to get the money she needs for fake documents, she finds she’s in possession of something incendiary- a way into this virtual prison the authorities did not anticipate, making her a think lifeline to those within.
Beer Two
As the “we are not allowed by law to observe you” limitation becomes increasingly necessary to keep the plot moving and hope alive, it also starts to feel unnecessarily self-imposed. What they’re doing is pretty unambiguously torture, after all, and even with the cheeky “… careful” disclaimer when that word is invoked, if they’re willing to go that far, why aren’t they observing and recording literally everything that happens in this world, the law be damned? Would definitely make for a shorter, bleaker movie, I suppose.
Verdict
Planet B is like a French feature-length Black Mirror episode with all the polish and morally intriguing sci-fi premise that implies.
