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Sometime in the late 1990s, filmmaker Harmony Korine undertook a project that, in many ways, still defines his artistic ambition. The abandoned documentary Fight Harm saw Korine trawling the streets of New York City, instigating brawls with random passersby. (Leonardo DiCaprio and magician David Blaine reportedly served as the film’s camera operators, which speaks to the kind of hipster-celeb bona fides Korine boasted at the time.)
There were rules: Korine could only egg on people bigger than him, and he could never throw the first punch. It’s a posture he has been perfecting throughout his career: a provocateur who is also on the defensive, an instigator who can roll over and play victim. Here is a guy who literally begs to get punched in the face. But take the bait, and he wins. This attitude makes Korine’s films extremely frustrating to write, or think, about. His latest—which is, by its director’s reckoning, meant to revolutionize filmmaking itself—proves especially vexing.
A fairly straight-ahead hit-man thriller, Aggro Dr1ft stars Spanish actor Jordi Mollà as BO, a masked gunman charged with taking down a burly, sword-wielding crime boss. When he’s not out on a mission, he rips around Miami in a sports car, zips around Biscayne Bay on a souped-up cigarette boat, raises an army of fellow assassins (including rapper Travis Scott), plays with his kids, and waxes on his own greatness (“I am a hero … I am the greatest assassin ever”).
What distinguishes—and, indeed, defines—Aggro Dr1ft is not its plot (it is vaporously thin) or characters (likewise) but its aesthetic. The film was shot with infrared cameras, and then packaged in post-production using AI technology, animation, and VFX—all rendered using video game engines. (Korine has referred to the multilayered process as “a technical snake.”) This gives recognizable shape to the various heat signatures onscreen: human, animal, vehicular, and otherwise. Sometimes, the AI generates swirling patterns on the human forms, which shapeshift mercurially like living tattoos. The color palette will swap suddenly, from red-orange to blue-green to yellow-yellow. Intermittently, a computer generated demon (representing BO’s conscience, or lack thereof) will loom, menacingly, in the sky.
In press and interviews accompanying the film, Korine has been vocal about the fact that Aggro Dr1ft is something other than a movie. “How do you take the whole idea of entertainment, of live-action gaming, and create something new?” the-allegedly-not-a-filmmaker pondered in a recent profile. “The obsession here is that there’s something else after where we’ve been—that one thing is dying, and something new is being born right now.”
Korine views Aggro Dr1ft (the first feature production from his new “multidisciplinary design collective,” EDGLRD) as some totally new form, distinct from the hoary old motion pictures of old. This despite the fact that it premiered at several international film festivals from Venice to Toronto to New York City, where it screened in spaces designated as “movie theaters”—and the more basic reality that it quite literally is a movie.
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Plenty of films have revolutionized the medium. Early pioneers like George Méliès and Edwin S. Porter did it by introducing cuts in the early 20th century. Dizga Vertov did it with the perfection of “montage”-style editing. Jean-Luc Godard did it when he violated the established rules of Hollywood film grammar with Breathless, circa 1959. Experimenters like Norman McLaren and Stan Brakhage did it by simply scraping on the film strip (or, in Brakhage’s case, affixing found bric-a-brac to it), eliminating the need for the camera altogether. You could argue that Toy Story was such a revolution. Or Avatar. These are all movies that, in one way or another, changed our understanding of what a movie could be. Yet they are still movies. It’s a matter of basic ontology. Adding sardines or pickled figs to a birthday cake does not make it not a birthday cake. It just makes a different (and, many might argue, worse) kind of birthday cake. So it goes with Aggro Dr1ft, the movie.
Of course, acknowledging this feels like playing into Korine’s hands. Imagine him cackling, choking on a stogie poolside, at the thought of his movie, in which a stripper inverted on a pole blasts a firecracker from between her legs, mentioned in the same breath as Vertov, Godard, and Brakhage. (To say nothing of Toy Story.) To be provoked at all by Aggro Dr1ft, or Harmony Korine, is to take the bait. Better, then, to take it seriously as a movie, which is what it is.
Korine’s attempted aesthetic interventions are hamstrung considerably by feeling so worn. He has cited video games as an inspiration. But these references feel outdated. Characters conduct themselves like NPCs in a Grand Theft Auto game, speaking in hacky, staccato phrases (“We love our home,” BO’s wife tells him, “But we love you more! You’re so sexy!”) Even the roiling infrared color scheme feels like a holdover from the culture of candy-flipping psychedelic raves, acid house music, and WinAmp (or AccuWeather radar) visualizers. It feels more like a recovered artifact from the late ’90s than the first expedition into a totally new, original visual language that is still being defined. The modified l337 speak spelling of the title is about a decade out of date. For a film that seems desperate to trade in the shock of the new, almost everything in Aggro Dr1ft feels old. It plays like dead tech.
It thunks especially hard precisely because Korine has, in the past, proven himself a totally canny, capable provocateur, whose work more truthfully reflected the respective spirits of their age. Trash Humpers, from 2009, cut against the ascent of the sleek digital age with a crummy, lo-fi, shot-on-VHS experiment in which he and three friends wear garish rubber masks, eat pancakes slathered in dish soap, and, yes, hump big bags of garbage.
Sleeker, but no less honest, was 2012’s Spring Breakers, which cast Disney Channel veterans Selena Gomez and Vanessa Hudgens as teenage girls gone wild, drawn into the thrall by a gangster named Alien (James Franco). For all its stupidity and excess, Spring Breakers knew that the culture was becoming increasingly obsessed with surfaces, and not substance, and it made a sexy virtue of its own hollowness. Even the abandoned Fight Harm, conceived during the epoch of Tom Green, Jackass, Jerry Springer, and the WWE’s Attitude Era, was honest about its ambitions: feeding the twinned desires for violence and self-harm.
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There are moments of this astute, inventive Korine in Aggro Dr1ft. (Who else would ever make this movie, really?) A severed head dripping blocky bits of blue blood, BO’s wife twerking in a fishnet two piece—these are unmistakably singular, even poetic images. But they are too few, and far between. Even at 80 minutes, the film is less of a sensory assault than a slog, as eyes and mind quickly acclimatize to its ostensibly alienating images. At the risk of sounding like a philistine, shouldn’t a film costarring a neon-orange Travis Scott smoking a blunt on a speedboat full of mercenaries in demon masks be, well, more fun?
Aggro Dr1ft’s post-movie ambitions may ultimately be vindicated, if only by default. As of this writing, it has not secured a traditional distributor, and rumors abound that Korine may distribute the film himself, via the EDGLRD website. (It will certainly play better streaming inside a vintage RealPlayer window, or projected on a wall of a nightclub during a rave fueled by sketchy ecstasy, or bath salts.)
“The old world is over,” BO declares early on. Maybe he, and Korine, are right. Maybe the movies are on life support, slogging through some long interregnum, waiting for some new, fresh form to replace it. But Aggro Dr1ft isn’t it. It exists at the dull (like, literally very boring) side of a dying medium. Not at the bleeding edge of some new one. When that new form, whatever it is, arrives, Korine will likely carve out a fruitful role expanding its visual palette. But with Aggro Dr1ft he broke his own golden rule: He threw the first punch.
