Mad God (2021)


If one sees stop motion animation in a big-budget feature post Ray Harryhausen chances are Phil Tippett is behind it.  He and David Allen were the main animators that carried on that legacy, with Allen usually working for lower budget productions and Tippett getting the tentpole projects.  Tippett was also the inventor of "Go-Motion", an innovation in the style that got rid of some of the jerkiness of traditional stop-motion.  He debuted that method in 1983 with Star Wars: The Return of the Jedi.  

Beginning in 1987 Tippett began working on his own movie called Mad God.  Mostly on his own and with students or volunteers he slowly created it, giving up as CGI became more the norm when he worked on Jurassic Park.  However, in the late 2010s, there was some interest in completing it and, after 34 years and a few Kickstarter campaigns, Mad God saw the light of day in 2021.

An assassin descends into the underworld in an armored cage.  When he arrives he begins his journey through a blighted landscape, equipped with a gas mask and carrying a briefcase.  As he travels he observes the horrors of the world around him.  It is soon revealed that he is there to destroy the world, but before he can he is captured by one of its guardians and turned over to a surgeon (Satish Ratakonda) who performs medical procedures on the Assassin while alive along with his nurse (Niketa Roman) assistant.

It is soon revealed that the Assassin was sent on his mission by the Last Man (Alex Cox), a celestial being that has an army of assassins.  Another is sent to attempt the mission again and travels through another part of the underworld ravaged by endless battles and filled with mountains of dead soldiers and destroyed machinery.  He also fails, but soon the Surgeon's plans for the original Assassin become manifest as a child extracted from him is turned over to a ghostly creature wearing a plague doctor mask and an Alchemist (Tom Gibbons) who have use for the child. 

Most of the action is animation, with occasional live action or puppetry.  There is no true plot connecting the events, only a series of actions.  It is never said whether the landscape is a true apocalyptic world or if what the Assassins experience are different versions of Hell.  Either way, the majority of the scenes are unnerving.  One particular scene, for example, involves creatures being eternally electrocuted so that they defecate, and their fluids feeding imprisoned biomechanical creatures.  Others featured an industrial complex where the workers are constantly murdered in many creative ways, only to be reborn and repeat the cycle. 

The music, by Dan Wool, is a combination of electronic and classic scoring that fits the atmosphere perfectly.  The only problem is the lack of a plot.  It feels like a number of ideas are there, and the creativity of Tippett is manifest throughout, but it feels like the story was barely formed.  The second Assassin's story, for instance, ends without conclusion as the movie switches back to the story of the first.  While Mad God looks amazing and all the hard work that went into it shows, it works better as a surrealist piece of art than as an actual movie.

Mad God (2021)
Time: 83 minutes
Starring: Alex Cox
Director: Phil Tippett

 

 

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