Dead Slow Ahead (2015) User Reviews

Wyrd happenings

[oOgiandujaOo_and_Eddy_Merckx · 10/10 · 30 May 2018]

Dead Slow Ahead is a slow film that relies on visual composition, and very little on traditional dialogue-driven narrative. It is haunted and phosphorescent. If you have sojourned with such "slow cinema" films before, imagine a phantasmagoric version of Peter Hutton's At Sea. This is the nightmare to Hutton's reverie.

The movie follows the ship Fair Lady and its crew over the briny and through miasmic ports. You could call it an experimental documentary. Whilst on the one hand the movie is very literal, that is, it is showing the normal activities of an actual crew on a working ship, on the other it seems to be designed as some sort of introspection on humanity's current phase, characterised by overreach, ecocide and unsustainable activities.

A middle section of seascapes has a tone after Clark Ashton Smith, a ship wandering in search of safe harbour on a globe overcome by wyrd happenings. The treatment of the humans we see remains empathetic throughout, with the criticism being of the machines in which they are entwined. This is the dystopian vision of Lang's Metropolis come true.

Hints of the supernatural come from various shadow plays, spectral presences amongst the sailors. The movie has all the unreasoning beauty of the death wish, and regularly took my breath away.

For people who like reading blank books

[bartnic1 · 3/10 · 21 September 2019]

This is the type of movie that appeals to a particular sub-class of people (I won't call them sub-humans :P). Yes that was a joke, get over it

Anyway. This movie is basically composed of the following:

A) Long shots (5-6 minutes long) of random scenes on a cargo freighter. It might be looking at a door. It might be looking at the cargo. It might be looking at a pipe. It might be looking at a rotating wheel.

Occasionally, the sights are quite beautiful. Like when the sun's rays are slowly being blocked out by some heavy storm clouds. Or when the camera pans over a vast misty (possibly polluted) sea. But those shots are generally rare.

B) Ominous music overlayed on top of these shots.

C) There is no C, that's it.

The movie doesn't offer any coherent narrative. It is up to the viewer to create a narrative. In other words, its like reading a book with no words - you just flip from one empty page to the next, imagining that the emptiness of the pages means something extraordinarily deep and powerful. And at the end, you can convince yourself that what you've read is a groundbreaking work of art - after all, who else would even consider the revolutionary idea of writing a book with no words, images, or content of any kind? You can convince yourself that it was all some reflection on a deeper narrative.

But the problem is, there's no actual reason to think that any of that is true. And why bother even having a movie, if the value of all of the content is meant to be imagined? Should the next movie simply be an hour long video of paint drying? The content is virtually equivalent to what is shown in this movie - just ordinary life on a tanker, with some admittedly beautiful shots. In the end, you're the one who apparently has to do all the work in transforming that imagery into something worthwhile.

These movies are instances of "the emperor has no clothes" in the art world. For the few who do enjoy these experiences - that's great. Just like I'm sure there are a also a few people who enjoy reading empty books, pretending it is all a deeper experience. Or those who enjoy looking at a blank canvas, thinking it a masterpiece.

But on some level, I think there is a logical error built-in to how they operate. After some time watching hundreds of films, some film critics have gone so far in searching for deeper interpretations, that somewhere along the way they've forgotten that films have to have content to interpret in the first place.