For the first half of Platform 2, I was wondering what all the negativity was about. I kind of loved the first film for its simple social metaphor. It was a Twilight Zone / Black Mirror type message film but it played with its ideas and had a slick final act. The Platform 2 complicates the metaphor… and then it kind of starts to torture the metaphor, and then the metaphor falls apart.
So the new film adds complexity… not only are we still in the 300+ floor structure with the descending meal tray… but people have started to organize. They’ve established an internal religion of sorts… that turns into a mutually agreed upon system of laws. The floors look out for each other and report when one floor breaks these rules. But when enough people start to dislike these laws, they break to new mutiny.
The idea of a set of common laws occurring naturally makes a certain sense. But I’ve been watching a lot of YouTube videos about “sovereign citizens”… a group of people who don’t believe the laws apply to them because they didn’t contract with the state. This film is basically the metaphorical version of these delusional folk… a group who reject these common laws because they didn’t agree to them when put into prison.
And I dig this angle and I was very much enjoying the film… but at about the half-way point, a large contingent of the “law” appears out of nowhere and the movie started to spiral. It led to a rebellion with the metaphor stretching but holding. But then it all goes to hell… and then the film just… shifts over to a new idea that feels like an attempt to explain some of the stuff at the end of the first film. It feels like a totally different film, abandoning its shaky metaphor and just doing something else.
That something else looks even more sci-fi than what the movie had been before and then dovetails into the end of the last film. It’s pretty confusing and hand-waving but also imaginative but poorly explained or justified. It feels like they think they are making sense…. but they aren’t.
I still like a large chunk of this flick but its clear they didn’t really think things through and then abandoned their new ideas for other new ideas. The metaphor snapped.
Score: 74