Escape from Staten Island

The First Purge.
Movie review by Kerey McKenna.

Warning: contains spoilers for The First Purge and other entries in the Purge franchise.

Escape from New York, co-written by horror icon John Carpenter, is a survival action yarn that imagined a fascist America that had sealed up NYC in hopes that its denizens would destroy themselves. The First Purge deals with many of the same themes, expanding upon the politics and dialing back on the camp. If certain people feel “triggered” that dystopian fiction “suddenly got political,” they haven’t been paying attention. When used right, a political dimension to horror movies can be more effective at unsettling an audience than a jump scare.

When the Purge franchise began in 2013, the dystopian backdrop seemed to be a cheap narrative device, a contrivance to explain why, in a world with cell phones, private security, neighborhood watches, and safe rooms, an affluent, white family would be threatened by a gang of killers in fright masks besieging their gated community McMansion. In the world of The Purge, we are informed that in the not-too-distant future, America is ruled by the regime of “The New Founding Fathers” and a national holiday has been created in which Americans are allowed, even encouraged, to rob, maim, and kill their fellow citizens, without repercussions for twelve uninterrupted hours as part of a night of national catharsis. It’s a fairly straightforward scenario that seems to invite so many more scenarios and questions then a simple tale of an affluent family besieged by killers (for that you could watch The Strangers, Funny Games, or House on the Left, just to name some off the top of my head); questions like: How did the Purge engineers get citizens to start killing each other? How do they expect citizens not to retaliate against each other the next day? Can’t the citizens use the murder holiday to take arms against the regime that puts them in a murder holiday every year? Who is suffering most in the Purge and who is benefiting? It’s a premise that demands further exploration or at least spoofing by the likes of Rick and Morty:

For their subsequent installments, the Purge movies (The Purge: Anarchy, The Purge: Election Year, and now The First Purge) have been doing the hard work of expanding upon the premise and dedicating more time to world building around that scenario of national murder day (it’s logistics, it’s winners and losers) and doubling down on a very clear political hill to die on. The Purge is the haunted house reflection of neoliberalism: it’s a campfire tale centered around fears that de-regulation isn’t actually leveling the playing field in society but actually serves to comfort the comfortable while letting the poor and disadvantaged fall behind and die from neglect.

I wonder if the movie has some thoughts about current political events?

So politics aside, what should you expect from the movie? Well, this is my first outing in the Purge movies, and I found it to be a well-paced survival horror ride that put me more on edge and impressed me more with its world building than the much lauded Japanese film Battle Royale.

The First Purge is set in a future in which the ascendant New Founding Fathers Party have designated Staten Island as the proving ground for the purge concept to sell the idea to the nation. Those who choose to participate (or are unable to leave the island) are promised money if they can survive the night (with additional cash bonuses if they “participate” in the mayhem). I believe this installment features more science fiction and special effects than the previous installments, as military drones fly through the air monitoring the island and some purgers have volunteered to wear special contact lenses that will broadcast their purging activities out to the rest of the country. The contacts come in a multitude of hues and glow in the dark. Seeing the bright glow in dark eyes as purgers hunt or hide from each other invokes the idea that the purge has reduced these people to a primal animalistic state of fight or flight. The new sci-fi elements make the feature feel a bit like a blown up episode of Netflix’s Black Mirror.

In a very deliberate statement, and unlike previous installments of the series, all our heroes are black and brown. Nya (Lex Scott Davis) is a saintly neighborhood activist protesting the purge and sheltering the civilians that cannot leave the island. Meanwhile her wayward younger brother Isaiah (Jovian Wade) has snuck out to purge in order to make some much needed money and settle a score with a violent junkie (Rotimi Paul) who the Purge has let loose into the streets. The local drug kingpin Dmitri (Y’lan Noel) begins the night protecting his gang’s territory but as the true horror of the night unfolds, he and his hoods become an impromptu militia and constabulary trying to hem in the carnage. As chaos ensues, their story lines converge as they attempt to survive the night.

Overseeing the purge are New Founding Fathers party stooge Arlo Sabian (Patch Darragh) and its apolitical architect Dr. Updale (Marisa Tomei). When a few hours of the purge only result in ruckus block parties, some vandalism and a little bit of murder (i.e. a standard holiday weekend in NYC), Arlo unleashes secret death squads of military contractors and white supremacists (in classic KKK, Nazi, and tiki-torch varieties) using the Purge as cover to cull the island along racial and economic lines. For some reason this both surprises and appalls Dr. Updale, who had envisioned the Purge as a temporary and egalitarian return to a state of nature, not the night of state-sanctioned violence against only the poor that it so obviously is. If Arlo is a horror movie straw man for Republicans/neoconservatives, then Dr. Updale is presumably a strawman of libertarian thinkers like those in the CATO institute, proposing ideas that in a vacuum would provide more freedom for all but are in practice used by the powerful enrich themselves at the expense of others. Yes, if the movie has a weak link, it’s trying to set up that the architect of the Purge a) has a conscience that is so easily pricked, and b) didn’t think a political party so excited to create a murder holiday might have some shady characters in it with ulterior motives. I think it would have been stronger commentary if they had gone full on Dr. Strangelove and have her more upset that her party superiors are messing with her pure scientific data than upsetting her sense of fair play.

Like Thanos in Infinity War, the heroes face a villain that drew a lot of dangerous conclusions about population from a Malthusian reading of history and instead of working to grow and expand existing resources and infrastructure with the considerable resources they have at hand, they have concluded that a percentage of the population must be murdered for the whole to survive.

Dystopian fiction often resonates with audiences by mining societal fears and intergroup tensions. Soylent Green and Children of Man are centered around over- and under-population respectively, but both are rooted in the fear that humanity is on an unsustainable path. Judge Dredd and RoboCop patrol the streets of American cities rotting from urban decay and under siege from gang crime. Demolition Man and Wallie are farces about nanny states that have infantilized the population so much, only throwbacks from a harder more difficult time can force them to grow up again. Logan’s Run and Battle Royale are about taking ageism (against the old and young respectively) to the extreme of one group culling the other through blood sports. Death Race 2000 and The Hunger Games imagine those blood sports as modern day bread and circuses used by decadent tyrants to distract and oppress the downtrodden masses.

So if you are looking for an ostensibly apolitical scare this summer, wait for the giant shark monster movie The Meg or for the Halloween reboot coming down the pipe from the same studio (and oh-so-subtly referenced by one of the characters in The First Purge who has a HUGE Halloween Poster). But if you can deal with not just slashers and blood but your political buttons being pushed, then check out The First Purge.

Kerey McKenna is a contributing reviewer to Nerds who Read and SMOF for the annual Watch City Steampunk Festival. Check it out at www.watchcityfestival.com.