Wow, I wasn’t sure what I could expect from this film, considering it’s a low-budget live-action reworking of an art-house animated film that uses footage from said animated film, but wow, this was not very good. If you at all enjoyed Angel’s Egg and were hoping that In the Aftermath would at least try to do justice to it, then you’re going to be as disappointed as I was. This film completely botches the meaning and story of the original film, simplifies the whole thing into a way more basic story, and is just very poorly written and executed overall. It’s a bit sad for me to see something like this, since I do like the idea of mixing media in film, but this is not the way to do it. I don’t want to be too harsh in my reviews generally, but as you can probably tell, I didn’t enjoy this movie very much. I’ll give you a sense of the story, but more so in comparison to Angel’s Egg, since we’ve already gone over that film (if you didn’t read that post, I recommend that you do so before reading this).
So, basically, in this version, the little girl, who is now explicitly identified as an angel, lives in another land beyond Earth, and the wandering man is now her brother who comes to tell her to go to Earth and see if it’s worth saving. Earth has apparently been left in a post-apocalyptic state, one in which people must wear gas masks and full body suits to survive on the outside. Two men, Frank and Goose, walk around and search for supplies, but when Frank goes into an old recruiting office, he comes upon a crazed sergeant who attacks him and steals his suit and mask. This allows the sergeant to get close to Goose, who confuses him for Frank, and both kill him and steal all his stuff. As Frank runs out and finds Goose dead, he sees the angel girl come to Earth, who promptly runs away upon noticing him. He chases after her for a bit, but eventually succumbs to the elements and passes out. He wakes up in a hospital where a lone nurse keeps filtered air pumping into his room. He spends some time with the nurse and plays a sentimental tune on a piano, which leads to a music-video-esque montage for a while. Meanwhile, the angel is unsure of what to do and whether or not she should help the humans, but she must decide soon, or it may be too late. Where does this end up going? You can probably guess, but I’ll leave that for now and move on to my thoughts.
Honestly, I was generally left baffled by the writing choices they made for this movie. They massively simplified the intentionally vague yet meaningful story and experience of Angel’s Egg in a way that almost felt like it was being written for children. It reminded me of those times where an American company would take an anime that’s meant for, like, an adolescent audience and change it in the dub to try to make it more “TV-Y or Y7” (not saying Angel’s Egg is for adolescents, it’s just a comparison). The voice acting is classic poor English dub material, and they added way more narration than there ever was in the original (which literally had none at all). Adding to this is the awful and downright bizarre dialogue writing, which sounds like it’s trying to be otherworldly and grandiose, but just comes across as really awkward. I remember this one instance where the girl says something like “my brother’s mad at me, he’ll spank me with asteroids,” which just left me going “what?” Oh, yeah, that’s another thing: they made the girl and man siblings in this. This completely changes their entire dynamic and simplifies an uncertain alliance into a typical “stern yet supportive” sort of thing. Of course, all of this isn’t helped by the fact that the film footage clearly doesn’t support a lot of their story writing, forcing them to front-load a lot of information, use narration to fill in the rest, and use the footage in a way that makes no real sense for the story that they’re trying to tell (which I sadly can’t spoil). The new live-action footage doesn’t fare much better, coming across as a typical low-budget affair that you’d probably rent at the video store or see on TV in the 80’s. There’s weak dialogue, poor acting, and even time filler masquerading as “art-house.” Seriously, there’s a section of this movie where Frank plays the piano in the hospital and it transitions into a montage of fading clips, like a music video. We see stock footage of the angel girl, as well as new footage of some woman that we’ve never seen before. It seems like they’re implying some sort of romantic loss, as if she was an old lover that he lost, maybe due to the apocalypse or something like that. I’d wager they were trying to go for an artistic thing with it, like the film is implying a backstory and emotion that we’re meant to pick up on without them telling us. The problem is that the film never crafts a satisfying enough story, state, or experience for us to be able to do that, and it just ends up coming across as tangential and meaningless. So, you can probably already tell that this movie doesn’t work and why it doesn’t work (or at least why I think it doesn’t). While it is a failure, I do have to admit that, conceptually, it does intrigue me a bit. I’ve noted this before, but I very much enjoy films that mix media, especially in a grand, weird, or artistic way. I have to be honest, the idea of a film showing the story of two worlds rendered in two different mediums, and about how they interact/cross over is kind of cool to me. In this instance, though, one of the mediums was essentially made to tack on to the other and try to tell a story that the other medium didn’t support. Apparently, looking into the background a bit, the filmmakers who made this version didn’t understand Angel’s Egg and only did this because the company got it in a bundle of other films (they also apparently gave the live actors little to no direction, which might explain a few things). Knowing this, the result makes a lot more sense. I think they might have been better served if they had made the Angel’s Egg footage into a story/legend that one of the characters tells throughout the film, or maybe as a recurring dream. They almost toyed with this idea at one point, that being when the angel is reflecting on her duties and Frank on Earth, and a fast zoom-in transitions into Frank waking up in the hospital. Even if they didn’t recapture the same experience that Angel’s Egg created, it might have at least flowed better as a film on its own. In the end, though, all we have is what was actually made, and what was made was not very good.
I was rather let down by this film, though I do think that, even in its poor quality, it was still interesting to see. Sometimes a film that tries something weird and doesn’t work can still be a unique experience all on its own. I’ll give the filmmakers some credit for at least trying, as I’m sure they didn’t have a lot of time or money to really do this, but I still wish they could have turned out a better film, especially one that didn’t dumb down the original so much. Anyway, if you want to see a cool and meaningful art film, watch Angel’s Egg, but if you want to see a low-budget baffle-fest, then In the Aftermath might just be your cup of….VHS tape.