Iron Lung

[silverscreenselect]

I know I'm getting old, but I haven't felt quite so out of the loop about a movie in a long time. Iron Lung is based on a video game. It has a cast of one person (except for a few voiceovers and momentary dream flashbacks), who also wrote and directed the film. It's a guy who is a popular YouTuber named "Markiplier," who I'd never heard of before seeing this film. To be fair, I'd never heard of the video game either.

The entire movie takes place centuries in the future in a cramped submarine called the Iron Lung. Most of the known universe has been destroyed by something called the Quiet Rapture, and all the planets and stars just vanished. Apparently, this rapture was caused by aliens or gods (the film never makes that point clear). A few people survive on scattered space stations, and one of those stations finds a moon that's still intact, but it's covered with a sea of blood. They send this Markiplier guy, who is a convict, to the moon looking for something valuable (again, they never make clear just what it is he's looking for). If he succeeds in his mission, he gets his freedom. He finds a giant creature of some sort (which might have been an alien or a god; you never see the creature except in blurry sonar mappings) and tries to get a sample of something so he can take it back to wherever he came from and get his freedom). Things go wrong and his sub crashes, and he spends the rest of the movie crawling around tunnels under his submarine that eventually lead to places where he can throw switches which turn on lights and computer panels that keep reading random numbers.) And he spends the better part of two hours doing this. At the end of the movie, his radio contact indicates that he's personally not getting back despite what they promised him earlier, but he needs to send them some vital computer data. Or something.

I'm still trying to figure out how an ocean of blood exists anywhere. It's supposed to be real blood, because you see it spattering the porthole at times, and the sub also springs leaks that get the main character covered in blood, which is suitably icky. The movie seems to have been made on a budget that's about the cost of a couple of video games. There were about 20 people in the theater where I saw it Thursday afternoon, and when it was over, I went to a group of about a half dozen in the row behind me and asked if they understood what that film was about. None of them did.

BUT THIS MOVIE IS ON TRACK TO LEAD THE BOX OFFICE THIS WEEKEND WITH A $20 MILLION TOTAL, WHICH IS VERY GOOD FOR THIS TIME OF YEAR. And that's despite no TV ads, talk show interviews, or other conventional marketing. The only thing I understand is that I wasted two hours of my life sitting through this.

I'm getting very, very old.

[Vandal]

My son and his fiancé saw this on Saturday. They both had heard of the movie and Markiplier through the gaming world. His description of the movie was as confusing as SSS’s.