Many of the reviews for Mad God inevitably focused on trying to describe one of “the bleakest dystopias [of] science fiction”, as The Hollywood Reporter’s John Defore put it. And in many ways, that is only right: the scope and majesty of Phil Tippett’s masterpiece should be fawned over in as much detail as the film press can afford to print.
It was, after all, a 30-year passion project – one which was shelved when the legendary animator wrongly assumed stop-motion would die thanks to the advent of CGI – before being resurrected thanks to a Kickstarter campaign and teams of volunteers. The undertaking was still so intense that Tippett had to be admitted to a psychiatric ward at one point.
So, by all means, praise the artistry on here – the endlessly detailed, layered rendition of Hell, which he painstakingly put together over three decades. Revel in every last morsel of this nightmarish labour of love. This is the kind of craft that only comes to fruition once in a lifetime – mercifully for the people involved in its creation – and it should be revered as a masterpiece for generations to come.
I do think that sometimes it’s easy to take the majestic visuals at face value when watching a stop-motion, though. Sometimes that is justifiable. But many critics also suggested that while they were happy to hand the film a four star rating on the basis of the technical achievements, they also suggested the story was simplistic, and lacking in humour – with The Guardian’s Leslie Felperin arguing Tippett is a “great technician but he hasn’t got the design flair of, say, Guillermo del Toro…”
And I think that’s more than a little unfair to Tippett. Because this is much more than Bosch on steroids. While the film might consist of “cruelty and a relentless squelchiness”, the bluntly horrific world – its idiosyncratic hierarchies; its strange and constrained bureaucracies; even its unnervingly soundtracked moments of consumptive bliss – seems to be saying that sometimes, the cruelty is the joke.
Punchlines
Spoilers ahead.
The character of The Assassin begins descending into Hell at the outset of the film. Dangling in a small pod, he is steadily winched down through layer upon layer of maturated, mutilated forms. Cloaked in the echoing splendour of Dan Wool’s bleak, foreboding soundtrack, he falls past fossils of great, ancient terrors; through barbed wire and entrenched, bestial soldiers; and past cavernous, abandoned cities. But however far he falls from the surface, however distant his contact from a world we could theoretically identify as ‘human’, the vistas and the behaviours which greet us only become more familiar.
Think about it for any amount of time, and suddenly it feels like the film is alluding to a chilling punchline. We should feel unfamiliar with this landscape, but amid the relentless carnage, the churn of life and death through acts of individual predation, or mechanised and nonsensical acts of anonymised brutality, this is not nearly far enough from home for comfort.
Look at the paranoid flailing of the war machine The Assassin first sinks past – revolving on 360-degree pivots, instinctively and inaccurately raining fire down on anything that moves. Look at the streets of strange, towering monoliths, blocking the light at ground level, which seem actively hostile to anything living. And look at the tired, world-weariness with which The Assassin – the outsider, our on-screen representative and guide – treats each environment.
Does a twitchy, murderous war machine which relentlessly fires on any breathing target, then figures out the PR – this was an accident/somebody else’s fault/good actually – later really sound like some impossible, unimaginable figment of Hell? Not to anyone who has been paying attention to the last century of military action; to US foreign policy; or to the unfolding horrors of the Gaza genocide and its accompanying atrocities on the West Bank.
Are vast, blackened cityscapes, where malevolent forces strictly and arbitrarily police who can or cannot eek out the necessary shelter to survive in this unforgiving landscape, something that far beyond our everyday comprehension? Not to anyone who has had to find new rental accommodation in the last decade.
And so, while a journey into the unknown like this might typically have a Luke Skywalker, or a Jake Sully – a familiar, human presence – to ease us into the horror, or to reflect our discomfort and confusion; here, The Assassin offers up almost nothing to help mediate the culture shock we might normally encounter in such a cinematic journey. This is not Dante and Virgil sinking through the seven circles of Hell – this is a half-bored office worker, approaching the descent into Hades with the same shrugging indifference he would adopt during a morning commute.
The Mad God
When Tippett finally reveals the world from which The Assassin originates, it becomes apparent why. Above ground, the character of The Last Man (played by legendary screenwriter Alex Cox – one of the only non-animated presences in the film) seems to have obtained global domination. Decked out in a set of robes, with grotesquely elongated finer-nails, he strides through crowds of his identically assembled storm troopers – all resembling The Assassin – with a great task in mind.
Handing a leathery map to The Assassin, in his pod, ready for the descent, The Last Man seems to have designs for what lies beneath their world. After all, what do you get the man who has everything? Something that already belongs to somebody else.
This presents us with another darkly comedic insinuation. Reflexively, we might perceive the titular Mad God as some sort of creator – with an opening text-scroll coming from Leviticus nudging us toward that assumption. Because that’s the word of God, right? And it’s pretty grotesque stuff in that text, which you might infer refers to the incredibly nasty things happening down in ‘Hell’. So, is this some kind of hypothetical world where a vengeful God has actually acted on his threats to punish the arrogance of man-kind? There are some interpretations of the film to that end, but I would argue not.
Later, when we meet a creature with God-like powers – the explosive capability to create new universes on top of the old – the being does not seem to have much ability to control what happens next; or indeed, much interest in it. Whatever comes from their initial efforts, once there is a universe for us to exist in, we’re on our own. In this scenario – one which we are all too familiar with – once civilisation evolves, the exploitation and cruelty which its elite use to obtain and maintain power become so entrenched that some conflate them with a natural order, and assume the world was designed by a malignant force.
But the only malignant force here, the only truly Mad God, is the man who has posited himself as the centre of the universe. The one whose troops now line the streets of a barren wilderness, devoted to his rule. And still, he is not satisfied, because having grown out of a social system where infinite growth, extraction and consumption have become the norm – a norm which his rise to power will have served to further entrench – the compulsion to broaden that empire remains, even at the limits of the Earth.
The only way is down. The Last Man sends The Assassin into the pit – falling through the worlds which may have come before, armed with a hand-stitched map, and a lone cluster of dynamite. But to what end? Some interpretations suggest an attempt to destroy ‘Hell’ – after all, The Last Man seems distinctly uneasy about what is down there. Again, though, I would have to argue that such a meagre set of weaponry can’t be expected to destroy the whole place – even in a highly abstracted piece of fantasy like this.
This seems more like a hostile takeover. The name The Assassin may indicate that the bomb is in fact intended for the ‘God’ who resides somewhere in the bowels of all this creation and destruction – and the beginning of a hostile takeover. But in doing so, when the mission inevitably goes awry, it presents that ‘God’ with the materials to start again – to kick off the whole random cycle once more.
The irony is that as The Assassin descends through the viscera of the failed worlds to have come before, each of which eventually may well have given into the same impulse, he may well be completing the same cycle as all of them. And as we stand on the cusp of a burnt out shell of a world – in which false prophets and strong-man demagogues, insist we ignore the warning signs, and in pursuit of growth without limit, plough ahead with expansionist military campaigns and ocean-boiling technology scams – it is a scenario which is not alien in the slightest.
Capitalism has run out of room to expand. When that happens, imperialist adventure abroad, and the creation of hostile, totalitarian grifts at home, are the instinctive reach, in a bloody and brutal race to the bottom. ‘Humourless’ as it might seem, Mad God is a ruthless comedic take on that state of affairs – and while those who rule this society might beg us to blame some abstracted other for that, while insisting business goes on as usual, the longer we refuse to face up to reality, Tippett’s wonderous horror makes a biting satirical point.
We are making, or have made, our own Hell.