Pinochet_Aviation

So, no viewer minds a director taking certain liberties with a true story to make telling it work for a 100-minute film. However, Anna Kendrick does so in the most cringeworthy and unfair ways imaginable. For example, on the episode of "The Dating Game" that serial killer Rodney Alcala was on (which is freely available to view on various platforms) Kendrick plays the contestant who "wins" the date with Alcala. Only here, Kendrick has the contestant dump the show's pre-determined, fun and double-entendre questions in favor of peppering the bachelors with nagging, aggressive, and semi-insane accusations thinly veiled as "questions" of her own creation. But NONE of that happened on the show. I mean, Kendrick made up the *entire scene*. She does this with other scenes, characters and lines throughout the film so I find myself wondering, why? Why would she change all of these well-known and verifiable facts of the case? It doesn't take too long to figure this out: Kendrick wants us to believe that serial killers like Alcala can exist because society (in the 1970s, certainly) didn't value the voice of the killers' female victims. Again though, that's not what happened. Law enforcement dedicated enormous manpower and resources to find Alcala, and the FBI had him on the "Most Wanted" list for years But the police had very little physical evidence, no reliable witness statements, no DNA testing yet, no cellphones to trace, etc. And, Alcala himself was charming, he fit in, altered his appearance often, was well-educated and intelligent, was adept at not raising suspicions. Kendrick's Alcala practically oozed an "ick" factor, you wonder "Geez, couldn't the police see right through him?" By the end of the film you're left with a really unfair and narcissistic narrative by Kendrick that "50 years ago society was oppressive crap and didn't care that women were being murdered by an easily found psycho." It's just insincere, mean-spirited and unhinged finger-pointing towards people trying their best with the tools they had at the time to stop a murderous beast.

A lot of reviewers have already commented on the inane and hilarious plot holes, setting and character behavior, which are all true. For myself, I can't get past the fact that everyone is able to be so DUMB and yet still be alive. I mean, nobody ever watches their children in a village where literal homicidal monsters come out at night to eat people. Windows are uniformly openable. There's a house of hippies who blithely sit around weaving, giggling, smoking pot, napping, humping and in general goofing off. Fun times! This relates to the most ridiculous and hilarious aspect of the show: everyone engages in constant navel-gazing. They sit around talking about themselves, weeping, braiding their hair, playing house, hanging around the diner gossiping, having some brews at the makeshift bar and otherwise being unproductive. Villagers argue and scream at each other like girls in a high school clique, constantly screeching at the top of their lungs about their feelings or some perceived slight or insult. The most competent villagers like the sheriff are hopelessly unable to establish rules, stability or even basic safety, with histrionic screaming assaults directed towards them virtually moment by moment. Incomprehensibly, villagers are permitted to, on their own initiative without consulting anyone, randomly take a stroll into the adjacent deadly haunted forest. Or to undertake mysterious and drawn-out pointless personal projects that soak up resources, none of these being ultimately useful or even understandable to the viewer. For this setting and the characters' behavior to make any sense you'd need to see rational behavior, or at least as rational as possible. Houses would be like mini fortresses, no windows, no openings, single access points/doors only. Villagers would spend all available daylight hours making repairs and cultivating food - given the fact they apparently have plenty of electricity for a never explained reason, we should be seeing them making productive use of it. Clothes would have to be mended and washed, sewage carefully disposed of, and people trained in medicine, carpentry, food cultivation, preparation & storage, and other useful skills. There wouldn't be any fat people, diets would be lean, food would be carefully consumed. No waltzing in and off-handedly grabbing a can of peaches and no waiting for someone else to bring you food. Criminality of any sort would be dealt with immediately and severely. Vices such as drunkenness and laziness, and antisocial behavior like outbursts and hysterics would be dealt with similarly, essentially treated like crimes. Children would be collectively minded at all times by an adult, no wandering about or choosing what they want to do and when they want to do it. Children would be taught and tasked with at least some minor productive chores they could accomplish together. For the adults, the same, there'd be a hierarchical order based on skill and merit, with everyone assigned useful tasks and missions, and with the expenditure of resources carefully weighed. No frivolous waste of resources and lives on individual whims or on soul-searching quests. Most importantly, the villagers would possess intimate knowledge of their surroundings - every square inch of the village, its houses and structures, the forest and land, and every item and object would be examined, catalogued and known. Children and newcomers would be taught and compelled to memorize this knowledge. Even the tiniest of changes to their surroundings would be noted and collectively discussed for its significance. As it is, the producers just give us a village of overly emotional histrionic weirdos who endlessly talk about themselves as they wait to be eaten.

Gillian Anderson is just simply in over her head here. She undertook this series as a sort of vanity project and is the show's executive producer. But she doesn't come across as a believable lead detective of a tense case involving a serial killer, it's like she miscast herself. In the first place, as other reviewers have observed, she's a sl*t, sleeping with several of her colleagues and possessing a deeply uncomfortable infatuation with the serial killer himself. I dunno, that's about as unprofessional as it gets for a police detective, no? Annoyingly, she keeps speaking in literal whispers throughout. And not just in a single scene where it's appropriate, but I mean throughout all three parts of the series, in every single scene. Is Anderson attempting to convey a sense of gravity or insight? It's irritating and very much unlike what I imagine how a professional lead detective would be communicating. And then there's her long-windedness (which of course is spoken in whispers) about wildly off-topic matters unrelated to the case. During one scene while interrogating the main suspect while he's in custody she engages in a rambling, aimless conversation with him about his first victim, his feelings, and why he engaged in certain behaviors many years ago. It was a mess of juvenile pop psychology, entirely laughable and of exactly ZERO VALUE in finding his latest victim who he had kidnapped and secreted away before he was fortuitously arrested. Finally, in a couple of scenes she blabbers nonsense about the "patriarchy," as if it's 1963 or something, and as if she herself has no agency or authority... as the *lead detective*. Most of the other main characters as well as the secondary ones were excellent, especially the serial killer, his teen "girlfriend," and a couple of the Northern Ireland cops - they deserved lots more screen time. Anderson just didn't do a good job with this, even though she controlled the entire production.