As evidenced by A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, Ana Lily Amirpour is a master of casting hypnotic spells with little dialogue and heaps of ambiguity. Outwardly, The Bad Batch looks like Amirpour’s bid to direct a sequel to Mad Max: Fury Road, but the near 30-minute dialogue-free opening act boldly announces that this dystopian desert epic goes deeper. Set in a lawless prison state across a border wall from Texas, the film sees Amirpour stretch her metaphorical writing chops and delve into the purely atmospheric and trippy side of filmmaking. The result is very much a George Miller-meets-David Lynch experience at times, but those beats in the story – survivalist chases and wordless, brooding set pieces – not only keep the pace interesting but illustrate Amirpour’s knack for balancing action and existentialism.
Some have criticized The Bad Batch for lacking substance and aping other films, but whereas the Mad Max genre of desert post-apocalyptic films focuses on warring factions and toppling hierarchies, The Bad Batch is less about conflict and more about the nature of surviving in less than ideal conditions, with all the seemingly contradictory moral decisions that entails. The film feeds on the notion that we are all good and bad and everything in between. Amirpour shoots her characters dramatically isolated in this vast desert. The loneliness compiles the ostracism for every member of the Bad Batch. She accomplishes an incredible amount without even needing her still-negligible dialogue.
There’s a very Western redemption vibe at work in the first half of Arlen’s story, but her arc brings her from that state of anguish and vengeance to a place of acceptance and belonging. When we first meet Arlen (Suki Waterhouse), she is being kidnapped by what look like savage desert dwellers. Savage is apt when they turn out to be cannibals, surviving in the desert by capturing strays and cutting limbs off one by one. Minus an arm and a leg, Arlen sees no civilized behavior in them and spares no one in her escape. From one extreme to the other, though, she finds safety in a camp ironically called Comfort, governed by a Jonestown-esque leader known as The Dream (Keanu Reeves).
Amirpour’s script focuses on the nature of good and evil, or rather the ambiguity therein. Arlen is not purely a victim. Given that she’s landed herself in the desert, she’s also a criminal – and one intent on bloody revenge. Heading out to a giant trash pile, gun in hand, she finds a cannibal scavenging for items with a young girl (Jayda Fink). Although the scavenger already has a broken leg, Arlen shoots her and takes the girl back to Comfort, clearly an attempt to give her a measurably better life in this barren wasteland. But she’s robbed the girl of her doting father (Jason Momoa, sporting a giant “Miami Man” chest tattoo) only to have The Dream immediately swoop in to take her into his harem full of pregnant wives. At least with her father she wasn’t likely to end up a child-bearing slave drugged into submissive bliss.
Even in such a brutal story, Amirpour infuses her film with sly irreverence. Arlen, for one, sports the same pair of yellow booty shorts with a winky face on the left cheek throughout. And the wandering hermit who appears periodically and seemingly survives by catching crows in his tattered shirt is, in fact, a completely unrecognizable Jim Carrey. Even Momoa’s Miami Man tattoo has an absurdist quality to it: it’s both his only character identifier and his scant backstory, as well as being undeniably gaudy. Arlen herself has “Suicide” tattooed on her remaining arm, as if taunting her with an out.
Amirpour’s world is one that doesn’t value those it throws into the “Bad Batch” wasteland, regardless of their safety. In the face of such exile, it’s up to each individual to draw the line themselves. If there are no rules, do you establish rules for yourself? As Arlen learns that there is no good way to live among the “Bad Batch,” so too does Amirpour show us that moral high grounds are subjective. This isn’t merely a question of the lesser of two evils, a gross oversimplification of the situation, it’s a question of adapting to a brutal, unforgiving reality. Miami Man is a hulking figure, but he’s also a talented artist, constantly drawing his daughter. We never get the sense that he loves killing, but it’s a necessity. In the film’s finale, even his daughter comes to understand explicitly how sometimes you have to kill the things you love in order to survive.
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