 Are you in the mood for another generic post-apocalyptic film? Arcadian has you covered. Nicholas Cage stars in his 957th film, Arcadian. He's gonna be raising his twin boys in a farmhouse in the middle of nowhere while some evil creatures come out at night. Let's talk about it. Before I jump into the spoiler-free review, if you like movie reviews, commentary, rants, rows, everything movies all the time, I would love if you subscribed to the channel. And if you like this video, hit that like button. I think that helps in the algorithm. Sheila, is that helping the algorithm? Yeah, she's not answering me. Okay, let's continue. Let's start with the pros. Arcadian is an hour and a half long, which I absolutely love, because even a mediocre film can be elevated by the fact that it doesn't overstay its welcome. And good news, Arcadian is very much a mediocre film. In fact, I'm gonna go out and say it's a bad film. It was really funny watching Civil War and then going to Arcadian because both movies have a bit of a war thing going on at the beginning of the flick. So just contrasting the different directing style, the budget, the look, the feel, it's wild. Civil War incredibly beautiful, competently shot, executed really perfectly as far as filmmaking goes. And then Arcadian has this ugly, shaky cam that's just all over the place. And that's gonna be the template moving forward for Arcadian. Cage's character, Paul, is two twin boys, Joseph and Thomas. These are gonna be the protagonists of the film. Paul Cage, he's more of a background character who lets these two have a chance to flourish on their own. That was a mistake. That was a mistake. People are gonna go to this for a Nicholas Cage vehicle and they're gonna be disappointed by the fact that he's not in it near as much as they think. He has about 50% of the screen time in this thing. And I'm being generous there. It was also just bad casting, I think, to begin with. Nicholas Cage is supposed to be playing this hardened father who is raising these two boys in this world that's not fit for mankind anymore. Nicholas Cage is a crazy dude in most of his movies. He's a wild card. He's really never saddled with kids. And when he is, he's certainly not a very good dad. So having him have to be this stern, tough, kind of Kyle Chandler-like character, if I could use an actor who would have worked better in this film, it just doesn't make sense. It doesn't work because he has these silly tics. And his cadence just doesn't work for the kind of guy that they're looking for in the script. So wildly miscast in my opinion. The boys themselves, they're serviceable. They're fine. One of them looks like Daniel Radcliffe. I kept making jokes with my buddy. We were the only two people in the film, of course. So I kept making little Harry Potter quips during the movie. Potion's class didn't train me for this one. These creatures are almost as scary as Professor Snape. The trailers presented this film as a it comes at night type of movie where things actually come out at night unlike that movie where nothing comes at night and I couldn't stand that shit. The film definitely keeps its promise, but what comes out at night is so freaking hilarious. So comically stupid to watch. I couldn't help but laugh half the time these creatures were on screen. Listen, we're spoiler free here, but I have to point this out. There is an animation that takes place when these monsters get into the picture more where they look up and they go and their mouth, their jaw clicks like a billion times an hour. It's so dumb looking. It's one of the most comically stupid decisions I've seen in a film. Like, oh, look how scary these creatures are. They're going at its core. This is a YA film. It's a young adult film because we're going to spend time on the farmhouse with Cage and his two sons, but the older son is going to go up to this estate on the hill that's very peaceful, very pretty, also contains a militia in the background for some reason that's never really addressed and kind of comes out of nowhere, but the boy's going to fall in love with the girl up there. And so there's going to be that little romance going on and it's just so eye-rollingly bad. This film has some very terrible edits going on. It felt like it was probably a much longer movie, but they had to cut it for time. And so people and timelines appear to be warping constantly. Here's one example. At one point, the sun falls down into a trench and the dad has to go save him. The dad's way up high and the next thing you know, he's just down there fighting the beast with the sun. Just, he just warped. It didn't make any sense. Now, to be fair, not to the movie, but to be fair to myself, I couldn't see shit in this flip. The lighting is atrocious during night scenes, especially down in the caves and whatnot. You are hard pressed to figure out what is happening. I know I couldn't. The sound design is fine. Again, the creatures are so comically dumb that it's hard to take any of it seriously. Music is there, kind of. The movie's very dull. It's just dull. It's kind of fun to laugh at how bad it gets at points and how comical some of the decisions are the characters make. But overall, this thing just has such a waste of time feel to it. Oh, I should also point out, and this is something I didn't know going in. It's a shutter flick. This is a shutter vehicle. Shutter is like the dollar store A24. They're trying to be A24, but they're not getting near as close as they should. So oftentimes, these films feel like cosplays of something much better. If you're a horror fan, hoping to get some scares out of this thing, I find that hard to believe. It's not scary. I will give it credit. There's only one jump scare in the whole film from what I can recall. And there is one scene. There's one specific moment that lasts for about two minutes that is kind of cool, where the creature extends its arm tendril thing and it keeps getting longer and longer. And I thought, that's slick. That looks like practical effects, and it's really selling it. I'm in. And this is one of the early scenes where we don't really know what this creature looks like. If it happened later on in the film, then it wouldn't have mattered at all. I would have laughed. But because it was early on, there was still some sort of disturbing hype build up to what these things could look like. It worked very well. I mentioned the shaky cam. It is freaking out of control in this film. It's all over the place. Monkey Man's shaky cam looks like it's on a tripod compared to this. So if you get a little queasy by the sudden jerkiness of the camera, yeah, you're going to not want to see this. You shouldn't see this anyways, because it's just not very good. This is maybe one to watch at home if you are truly bored. But I think there's better uses of your time. All right, let me know your thoughts on Arcadian. Clearly, I was not a fan. But let me know. Leave a comment. Please like the video. And again, subscribe if you haven't. I post movie reviews, content of all sorts of types for movies every single week on the channel. We'd love to have you stick around. All right, take care.