Space Monkeys (2022)

Film review #634

Director: Aldo Iuliano

SYNOPSIS: Five affluent teens are throwing an end-of-summer party. Moving on to one of the teen’s houses while his parents are away. They use the house’s A.I. to participate in increasingly extreme drinking games, but a tragic turn of events forces the youths to reflect on events and themselves…

THOUGHTS/ANALYSIS: Space Monkeys (Also known as Code Terror) is a 2022 Italian film. Centred around five affluent teens who are throwing an end-of-summer party, they visit the home of Stefan, one of the teens, who shows them around this bizarre home full of weird aesthetics and a home A.I. named Able, who controls the functions of the abode. Stefan gets Able to concoct a series of increasingly extreme drinking games, pushing the teens to their limits. The setup for this film is a bit of a horror and sci-fi one: A group of young, unlikable teens get trapped in a house with an A.I. that tries to kill them….that’s what I thought the film was about based on the trailer anyway. The only thing to say about the first half of the film is that it serves simply to make the five teens seem as unlikable as possible: they’re either obsessed with their social media, arguing with each other, or pushing each other to do stupid things. Stefan, in particular, is such an odious and annoying personality it’s difficult to tolerate his presence: seriously, he says some very nasty things. Marta is the only one who seems to have any sense of reason, but that just begs the question why she is friends with the rest of them anyway. I was waiting for the film to actually begin, but as mentioned, the first half is just constant drinking, arguing, and stupid pranks that never seems to end, and you’re left wondering what you’re doing watching this, or when something of purpose is going to happen.

At the halfway point of the film – almost down to the very second – we get the film flipped on its head and finally a sense of direction, as Stefan dies from a choking prank gone wrong. Finally, the free-loving have to confront reality, as they have to deal with what to do with Stefan’s body. The film continues to be as sporadic as the first half, with no real direction and the characters just aimlessly wandering about; which is somewhat to be expected given the circumstances and the fact that they have never dealt with anything like this before in their sheltered lives. There’s a hint of the film wanting to do a The Breakfast Club style intervention for Gen Z, but that just doesn’t work because we don’t know any of the characters, and they don’t really confront themselves or their relationship with any of the others: one of the characters just wanders off and doesn’t come back until near the end. With The Breakfast Club, the characters were forced to confront themselves through each other, interacting with people they wouldn’t normally, and learning about themselves and others. In Space Monkeys, there’s a distinct absence of any of that. The only character that seems to deal with the situation is Marta, but we still don’t get much of an insight into her character to really get involved with the dilemma she or any of the others are facing. The film’s setup with the whole A.I. trying to kill them and whatnot just…evaporates into nowhere as well, and we’re left wondering just what the point of it was. I don’t know if I was supposed to feel bad that Stefan was dead by the end, but I really wasn’t: he was absolutely insufferable.

There’s obviously some intention behind the way the film is structured: the way the film flips at exactly the halfway point is meant to shock these carefree youths with reality, and there’s a number of scenes where the camera is purposefully placed at a specific angle to frame things, but again, there’s no real substance to anything, nothing to interpret, and no maturity in any of the characters. The film ends abruptly with the four abandoning their plan to say that Stefan died on his own without them being there, and just calling the police to tell them the truth, which I suppose is meant to show them taking responsibility; something which wasn’t earned in their aimless wandering through the film, and it just makes the whole thing just seem like a waste of time. Any attempt at redemption of these characters fails because the film goes so far and hard in the first half to make them unlikeable. By the time the film tries to turn it around, it’s too late to dig itself out of the hole it has made for itself. A glint of intention behind a directionless mess, Space Monkeys fails to get to grips with it’s characters, and any attempts at redemption and confronting reality through the events that transpire are far too inadequate due to the sizeable hole the film digs itself into by making the characters as obnoxious and unremarkable as possible.