Sion Sono releases Nicolas Cage’s cool in Prisoners of the Ghostland.
WHAT IS THIS MOVIE??!
Six days into a film festival you start to feel your mind rebel at the thought of processing another Clever Indie Gem or World Illuminating Documentary. If you could retreat to the snack bar in that moment and buy yourself something crunchy and sweet and feed it directly into your eyeballs, Sion Sono’s Prisoners of the Ghostland would be that seven dollar cinematic sugar rush.
Nicolas Cage makes movies fun to watch. This is showbiz canon, and nobody can stop it from being true. Silver nitrate runs through his veins — this is his world, and he knows how to navigate it. Under Sono’s direction, and borrowing influence from Carpenter, Tarantino, and the Mad Max series, DP Sohei Tanikawa, production designer Toshihiro Isomi, costumer Chieko Matsumoto, and editor Taylor Levy have elevated this fundamental truth of cinema to a next-level universe. The resulting hyper-stylized live-action manga kabuki western feels at times more like a video game universe than a movie, but it never fails to be cinematic.
In this particular, peculiar corner of the universe, Cage (whether or not his character has a name, it’s Cage) finds himself caught red-handed in a bank heist gone wrong. Dragged in chains before a despotic Governor (Bill Moseley, projecting plantation owner vibes), he’s given a sole option to reclaim his freedom: he must rescue the Governor’s beloved granddaughter Bernice (Sofia Boutella) from an apocalyptic netherworld into which she’s been abducted. Oh, and he cannot remove his ultra cool black leather getup or otherwise disobey mission parameters or else implanted explosives covering his neck and testicles will go off.
After peddling away on a banana seat bicycle, Cage upgrades to a slick black race car which delivers him to the netherworld. There, he finds Bernice in a slave market for broken girls. He then learns from a chorus of children in tattered rags how the wasteland became a post-nuclear penal colony, its inhabitants prisoners of time. Realizing he has a duty to do what he can to help these lost souls, and not least because he has discovered that he has become contaminated by the radiation of the ghostland himself, Cage and Bernice take on their cause and he becomes their hero, re-prioritizing the release of the prisoners of the ghostland over the Beatrice’s return to her grandfather’s samurai-guarded brothel.
The more established characters of the ghostland, some of whom followed Cage from the Governor’s seductive enclave, doubt his chances at success, but with cinematic aplomb backed by a rhythmic score, Cage gathers an army of the tattered, toxic, and beaten, and, donning the helmet of a deceased court jester, sets out to prove them wrong. Along the way they run into his old partner in crime from the failed bank heist, Psycho. Disfigured and radioactivated due to his proximity to the cataclysm that originally transformed the wasteland, he agrees to use his resulting powers to transport Cage and Bernice back to the world of the living.
There, in a classic western showdown involving gunslingers and samurai (hat tip to Tak Sakaguchi who honors the role of head samurai here) Cage and Bernice emasculate the Governor while liberating the brothel, the prisoners of the ghostworld, and Cage’s remaining testicle.
Absolutely devastating not to see this popcorn delight on the big screen, but well worth the trip regardless.
