Over-reliance on randomness and chance won't get you very far in Vegas.
It’s no goddamn surprise that the entire universe is ruled by random chance and no reason. The nebulous cloud of the universe where the pandemonic chaos of particles crashing into one another gives birth to some rather bizarre occurrences which take the right kind of eye to observe. Seemingly natural event which people take for normality are the product of a broken logic which leans on randomness, much like a dice with infinite sides rolling around the place in ecstasy. How does one account for their place in the cosmos, the things happening around them and the surreal energies that are moving the spheres along their paths? You simply don’t. You accept the things that pop into the air and go about your day, and if one of those things happen to be something that catches your eyes more than the others, you observe until the thing in question figures out the eyes that are upon it and swiftly annihilates itself.
Randomness is deadly weapon when it comes to storytelling, if it’s done right with the proper set-up and room to mutate, then its effects are unprecedented upon the mind. It’s a double-edged sword however because randomness in itself is not enough to sustain the weight of a good and compelling story, it needs a method to its madness or else it’ll step on the wrong nerves of the observer. Rubber (2010) is one such film which sadly falls in the latter. The premise is wonderful, the sort of thing you can’t really ignore even if you tried, a killer tyre rolling around the desert making things and people alike explode? Yes of course I’ll have massive massive quantities of that. I remember watching this film once as a kid and naturally my small brain was twisted in beautiful confusion as the primary effect of the image was enough to hold me spell-bound. Who knew that many years after that viewing, I’d come to really dislike the film? I even watched it while extremely drunk, surely that should be the most suitable state in which to watch such a film, but no, things quickly turned sour within the first half hour.
The opening is quite weird and interesting and the way the concept is set up with n group of spectators armed with binoculars standing in for us as the audience who are just as clueless about what is happening as we are is an entertaining and self-aware way to get us into the film but this trick soon starts to get very old. We’re explained that many things both in films and reality happen for no reason and we’re expected to make do with just that. I know the whole deal is satirical towards the conventions of cinema and storytelling but just making allusions to these tropes is not enough, its missing that clever spin which sets a good satire apart from the vast mass of blandness that passes itself off as satire. There’s barely any presence of a set-up and that handicaps the film so badly that the pay-off is equally as absent. The one character who has the potential to be anything approaching interesting when he doesn’t accept the deathly hospitality of the forces that be, he’s totally squandered later on as he begs for more action and violence in an almost pathetic manner. I was more than happy once the film was over because it starting to become rather unendurable near the end.
I believe the only way to enjoy this film is if you’re in a total state of logical incapacitation where all sense of quality and taste becomes obsolete, two steps away from apathy where you really couldn’t give less of a fuck about what is going on. What I do respect about this film however, is that it also doesn’t give a fuck about what it’s audience is up to, but the film has less leverage than the audience has upon it and that sort of attitude won’t get the story very far if there’s no one around to watch it.
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