There’s something hollow at the heart of this new red-band trailer for The Belko Experiment, a bloody horror-thriller written by James Gunn (Guardians of the Galaxy) and directed by Greg McLean (Wolf Creek). It took a few minutes digesting to suss out exactly what’s missing from this Battle Royale rip-off: not only is there nothing creative about the idea, but there seems to be no satirical target whatsoever. Weird. Can The Belko Experiment float on blood and mayhem alone?
While Battle Royale heightened high school drama, adolescent angst and a conservative hatred of youth to deadly levels, The Belko Experiment doesn’t even seem to be going for a corporate critique. The trailer makes it clear that the company is a non-profit and all the characters are much more office schlubs than finance bros. Is the point something about the inherent savagery of humanity? Because that seems sufficiently generic to wonder why they’d even bother. Without any sense of a satirical edge or thematic component, The Belko Experiment feels very nearly weightless.
Combine that with maybe the most shamelessly derivative plot since The Force Awakens and it’s hard to even fathom The Belko Experiment ’s genesis. What could inspire someone — especially someone as creative as James Gunn — to sit down and regurgitate other movies so shamelessly on to the page? And exploding head devices? Surely that’s still firmly in the over-used stage of the cliché life cycle, not yet ripe for ironic or thoughtful reappropriation.
It’s not even that The Belko Experiment looks all that bad. It’s just so… baffling.
So what is The Belko Experiment other than another movie pitting normal people against each other?
Maybe there’s some twist or mystery or component we’re not seeing in this trailer?
Or maybe we’ll only have execution to count on. Will exciting bloodletting and violence be enough? The Belko Experiment comes out March 17, 2017, should you be curious enough to find out.
