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ZERO STARS/**** starring Sadie Sink, Kelvin Harrison Jr., Murray Bartlett, Regina Hall written and directed by Geremy Jasper
by Walter Chaw Every once in a while, a film comes along that is so not for me I don’t even dislike it. I don’t feel anything towards it. We barely exist in the same dimension. It’s like an animal from the deep ocean presented to me for my approval or condemnation, a cuniform poem written in a dead language; I don’t even have a baseline to test it against. Whaddaya mean, “Do I like it?” What the fuck is it? It’s dinner and a show at H.P. Lovecraft’s house. You could say that Geremy Jasper’s O’Dessa shares DNA with Six-String Samurai or Anna and the Apocalypse, or that it’s what The Wiz would be like if a sea cucumber and Alejandro Jodorowsky’s medulla oblongata collectively excreted it, though I look at it and all I see is a collection of stuff slammed together using an organizing principle I can neither recognize nor articulate. It is the product of an alien intelligence, and while it might appeal to children at a specific developmental age, I don’t know whether that’s good or bad or what that sweet spot is. I guess I could say the music in this musical (?) is just fucking godawful to my ear, but we live in an age where Lin-Manuel Miranda is treated like the second coming of Kander & Ebb. Again, there are things in the world that are not for you, and you’re better off leaving them alone, lest the existential horror of reckoning with your strangeness in this time and place swallow you whole like that kid in Stephen King’s “The Jaunt.”
O’Dessa (Sadie Sink, a person famous for starring in a terrible show a lot of people who haven’t seen the things it’s ripping off seem to adore) is the “Chosen One,” the “Kwisatz Haderach,” the “One Whom the Prophecy Foretold,” wandering the wasteland following the death of her mother, armed with only the beat-up guitar her dad gave her and a bunch of songs that sound like Lucinda Williams getting beaten by a metal kaleidoscope. Please don’t misunderstand: I’m not saying the music is terrible–I’m saying I don’t understand how anyone could think it’s tolerable. Remember the end of Mr. Holland’s Opus when the masterpiece this guy’s supposed to have been composing his entire life is finally performed and it sounds like someone exploding John Tesh with a firecracker? Maybe it’s better for everyone to marvel at what a masterpiece something is without confusing a significant portion of your audience by actually playing it. Anyhoo, O’Dessa is on a quest across Fallout: Las Vegas to battle Mr. Beast-like Plutonovich (Murray Bartlett), who speaks like Simon Cowell and is named after the God of the underworld, or possibly in reference to the concept of a “Plutocracy,” the etymological ethnic/antisemitic implications of that portmanteau be damned. Plutonovich is the master of a Hunger Games/Thunderdome spectacle where poor people are tortured for the sake of winning some money. O’Dessa has a message!
Along the way, O’Dessa meets a singer/prostitute named Euri Dervish (Kelvin Harrison Jr.), who is perhaps modelled on the Pie ‘oh’ Pah character from Clive Barker’s Imajica. They fall in love, have Johnny Dangerously sex, and am I here? Can you hear me? Have I told you that Plutonovich’s show looks like “Max Headroom”? O’Dessa calls herself a “rambler,” which is either an AMC “Kenosha Cadillac” or a person who blathers on and on. She says it means she “brings comfort to the disturbed and disturbs the comfortable,” a quote stolen from Mexican poet Cesar A. Cruz and put in the mouth of the single whitest person in a world where Bobby Flay exists. O’Dessa, after she gets laid, sings a song that sounds like Wanda Jackson being tased, an apparently appealing noise for the other denizens of this Technicolor post-apocalypse. Did I fail to note that O’Dessa’s farm ran on “plasma”? Plasma, evidently the stuff “Billie Jean”-era Michael Jackson had on the bottom of his white penny loafers that lit up sidewalk squares. There’s another bad guy in O’Dessa, but the real villain is that at 106 minutes or so, it feels like O’Dessa’s odyssey of weeks unspools in real-time. You know those dreams where you’re running as fast as you can but don’t seem to get anywhere? Oh, and there’s a part that reminded me of that bit in The Man Who Fell to Earth where the title character zones out in front of a wall of televisions. What was I talking about?
Throughout O’Dessa, O’Dessa is visited by a mysterious, eyeless prophet (earless, too, maybe–that would certainly explain a lot) who first urges one of O’Dessa’s ancestors to construct her holy axe from a lightning-struck tree. Wait, is this thing a metaphor for rehab? Because there’s an entire subplot/montage where O’Dessa helps Euri “kick” his addiction. You can have that one for free, future cultists fuelling their outrage by reading pans of this object they’d like to make their whole identity. Here’s another one: Plutonovich frequently quotes Billy Preston lyrics, something you wouldn’t do lightly if you had any self-awareness. O’Dessa takes the stage for the final Crossroads showdown, except the devil this time is Media and, um…the Eye of Sauron? I should also say something about the feral Road Warrior kid (it’s implied here, as there, that he becomes a great leader), not to mention the explosive, plasma-related maybe-martyrdom when it’s revealed to O’Dessa that her Black boyfriend has been hollowed out–“face-jobbed,” in the film’s vernacular–and immortalized as a skin mask exploited by the establishment. That’s interesting, because the only other person in the film we see flayed and appropriated in this way is an Indigenous man. They shoulda called this “Can of Worms,” amiright? Okay, well, fuck everything. Tommy is still available to stream somewhere, yes? Go watch that. Good luck out there.
