A Pair Of Losers
One benefit of “cutting the cord” on my television watching is getting a wider array of viewing. Documentaries could be found on cable or satellite, but it was a limited range and limited quality. (Not much interested in “documentaries” that breathlessly tell me how “ancient aliens” are the basis for modern society)(Oh, and if that is your thing, you’ll find plenty of that in the streaming universe as well. It’s just not the only thing). Services like Pluto TV offer channels dedicated to only documentaries. So I’ve been availing myself of them. If you scan back through, you’ll see I’ve been watching them for a while. With the increased hours available for it, I’ve tried to hit them a little harder recently.
Not all of them have offered much in return for my time investment. Take these two as examples. They both want you to believe they are serious documentaries. They each found a unique way to offend me.
Let’s start with “The Landing” (2017). It presents itself as an in-depth examination of the tragic events surrounding the Apollo 18 moon mission, that ended with two American astronauts dying in a Chinese desert. For a member of the “space generation” that sounded fascinating, if a bit puzzling. I didn’t remember the incidents off the top of my head, but the last moon mission was in the early ‘70s, and college cost me a couple brain cells in the years after that. Soooo…
Yeah, you may have caught it sooner than I did. There was no Apollo 18 mission. Apollo 17 ended the string of American moon missions. This isn’t a documentary. It’s an alternate history movie. Which is fine, but I always thought the “Blair Witch Project” was a cheap publicity stunt by “pretending” it was real. This one put me off as well. I became suspicious because of that “breathless” style I mentioned before. The story goes like this-as the Apollo 18 astronauts prepare to re-enter the atmosphere at the end of their mission, there is some kind of problem. Their pilot maintains the re-entry angle is wrong, which will cause them to skip off the atmosphere and flung into space. He assumes manual control, missing the designated water landing location. They land in central China. All three crew members survive the landing but two die from a scratch from a poisonous plant. Only the pilot survives. There are investigations, one in Congress, the other by the FBI, that reach very different conclusions. One clears the pilot, the other says he may have sabotaged the landing and poisoned his shipmates.
It’s an interesting idea that the movie explores adequately. With one MAJOR oversight. At no point does anyone provide a reason the pilot would do this. There are dark murmurings about the Chinese, the Cubans and the Russians, but no one comes up with a reason, other than the pilot, a USN flyer, is a bit of a jerk. They spend an enormous part of the movie-going through the minutiae of the investigations but never tell us the single most important item on any investigator’s checklist – motive.
The movie drags in the final third, and you’ll never reach a proper conclusion. Plus, they faked me (and a lot of other viewers, it appears) out at the beginning. Not good.
Rating – ** Not Impressed
Then we have the actual documentary of our pair today. That’s “Cold Case Hammarskjöld” (2019), which looks at the events surrounding the tragic death of United Nations Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld in Rhodesia (modern Zambia). Danish filmmaker Mads Brügger and private investigator Göran Björkdahl go to Africa to determine if the U.N. official died in an accident or was assassinated. Björkdahl’s father had a connection to the original U.N. investigation and inherited a piece of sheet metal allegedly from the crashed plane.
You might think the movie is about Björkdahl’s journey following his father’s footsteps, completing the work that was never finished.
You would be wrong.
The movie centers on Brügger, including tedious scenes of him discussing the movie with two Zambian secretaries as he dictates the final script. His arrival in Africa, his contacts with officials, his, his, his. It’s an astonishing piece of cinematic ego massage. A little research told me that the self-referential style has a name-meta cinema. I will spare myself any further experiences with it and advise you to do likewise.
Then there’s the movie itself. It plods along, telling the story of an almost forgotten death of a largely forgotten man. In his day, Dag Hammarskjöld was an influential and daring world leader. He believed that the U.N. could be and should be a power for correcting the injustices of the world. He rose in a time when the old colonial model was in its final death throes. Colonial powers wanted nothing to do with his insistence on turning over the governments, lands, and resources of the colonized lands to the people who lived there. That someone or some government might decide to get him out of the way is very real.
Instead of an exciting attempt to track down the truth in the heart of Africa or the centers of power in Europe, we get this epic piece of nonsense. Once it becomes clear that they can’t determine what happened to the DC-8 in question (there is an hysterical scene where Brügger a few others go out to dig up the wreckage. There are a few problems. A glance at the photo of it being buried shows that it is at least ten feet underground. The five of them show up with a couple of shovels and a metal detector, while Brügger is in a dress shirt and tie! It’s insane), the movie pivots to a whole new story. About a white supremacist group that may have tried to kill every black person in South Africa.
The movie is your classic “train wreck/dumpster fire.” It can’t be what it wants to be, and can’t come up with a central concept to tie all the pieces together. It does a decent job of reminding us who Dag Hammarskjöld was, but the rest plays like a mockumentary.
Rating – ** Not Impressed.
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