In 2019—by the way, one of the best years cinema had lately—Netflix premiered the most successful Spanish movie of that year, The Platform. This suspense film/thriller presented an interesting minimalist concept slightly inspired—even though it was never confirmed, but if one has a good memory like me, it would have been easy to recognize—in Denis Villeneuve's short movie titled Next Floor. Villeneuve's work presents a story in which several high-class people grotesquely eat a feast mostly of meat until exhaustion, which causes the table to plummet to the "floor" below along with the guests, who have to keep eating despite of the debris in their delicate suits. Everything happens while the chefs, waiters and the head of the kitchen watch these people devour everything in front of them without hesitation.
Just like how Villeneuve presented a critique in his short film, which didn't stand out at the time, the social critic in Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia's first film presented a powerful aspect of the most common problems that distress most of us. Poverty, inequality, morality and belongingness are some of the topics explored in this high-concept thriller that presented Goreng's story. This man wakes up on a weird platform with 333 floors and two strangers living in each of them that wait for a floating table with food to descend every day.
SHORT FILM BY DENIS VILLENEUVE:
Obviously—as the movie's main character explains—people on higher platforms would eat almost everything and leave the remains to the others. But the interesting part about this issue is that, after a month, every person is induced to "sleep" and relocated to another floor. How would this affect those who haven't eaten anything and then have everything the following month? Unexpectedly and much to everyone's surprise, these almost existential questions and the universe the director created were a hit with the public, which transformed the movie into a type of cult work with several memes that offered something… different.
Five years later and—I dare to say—without anyone asking for it, we are presented with a sequel that is actually a weak and wasted prequel. Yes, the director, who in a few months will apparently release Rich Flu, a movie with similar themes, decided that the best way to go was to tell us the events prior to the first installment. Was anyone curious about them? Let's suppose someone was. Let's suppose that, at a certain moment in 2019, while watching the first installment, I asked myself who were these people involved in the social experiment and what did they obtain from it. Were they human beings controlled by aliens that wanted to analyze them or was everything part of a huge government conspiracy to cause chaos?
Ironically, this prequel doesn't add anything new to the story. What could have been a great opportunity to fully explore the motives, lore and possibilities that the concept of "the platform" entails ended up being an absurd repetition of the first installment that ultimately left me with more questions than reassuring answers. And no, I didn't expect to have everything handed to me on a silver platter—pun intended—like Nolan would do, but I also wasn't expecting to be more confused than normal. In this new installment—please, don't let it be a trilogy—we meet Perempuan and Zamiatin, two souls with tragic pasts that are new to "the platform." But the twist—or the innovative aspect—is that this new film tries to focus on fanaticism and the collision of ideas that may coexist in this social pyramid.
The prequel—which has an even more "grandiloquent" mise-en-scène—seems shy with the spectator. Now we witness more clever deaths and blood everywhere, but I still felt that the movie didn't offer anything new nor encouraging to watch. Does Netflix actually go by numbers or by what people want? Who thought The Platform's sequel would be a hit? There's no such origin story, everything is half "baked"—pun intended again—and, at the end, nothing seems to make sense. I'm only left with the bad memory of wasting 100 minutes of my life without receiving a message, learning a lesson, enjoying a moment nor watching a work that encourages me to come up with ideas and theories in my mind.
PS: I just discovered these movies will comprise a trilogy. I don't know what to think anymore.
BY JERÓNIMO CASCO
Posted on OCTOBER 14, 2024, 16:05 PM | UTC-GMT -3
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