Saw The Faculty, a very 90s sort of update of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. It has a lot more big names than I remember. Elijah Wood is there with his giant blue eyes, and Josh Hartnett plays counterpoint, with his little cat-like eyes. A lot of eye-related attractiveness going on. Anyway, the film is fairly goofy fun. The plot is ludicrous of course, with the 20-something-year-old "teenagers" getting high on caffeine and also caffeine is somehow more dehydrating than salt? Bad science aside, there's a fun sense of the teenagers getting together, falling prey to paranoia and never knowing quite who the enemy is. Good sci fi stuff.
It is fundamentally a dumb and harmless movie, but it's got a lot of (possibly unintentional) creepiness in how the heroes behave. There's something sinister in the eagerness of Josh Hartnett's attractive genius stoner character to go homicidal on his teachers. The songs "School's Out" and "Another Brick in the Wall" feature heavily on the soundtrack. I think the film cynically believes that there's a part of kids that really do want to murder their teachers (one teacher even hamfistedly says "I'm the authority figure here!" before Hartnett mincingly sneers her back into submission.) The parasitic alien makes everyone serene and calm. It's a false calm of course, and the violence of the main characters gives the film some grey shades, but why is it that calm is a sign of external and alien control? I wish I had been told a more comforting lie.
The movie is dumb (and for me nostalgic) fun. It's clearly not a movie with a ton on its mind, which exists only to give kids of the 90s what is cynically assumes they want (teacher-murder) Is that what kids want? It isn't what I wanted. Eh. A miss.
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