Shep Smith
Having just this second finished watching this movie for the first time, then reading the profusion of negative reviews here, I wanted to add my two cents.The only real problem with Freedom Deep is the baffling description its makers have attached to it. I suppose you could suss out the details if you were looking for them, but without any real dialogue the official synopsis sounds like a far fetched fan theory. That doesn't mean it's a bad movie, though. If you expect a torrent of near-psychedelic images that dances somewhere between Richard Stanley and Pink Floyd's The Wall, you'll be more than pleased. That Aaron Stevenson compares it to the Book of Eli is not only inexplicable, it doesn't do the movie justice.As an aside, the DVD copy I watched had some sound artifacts on it. I don't know if this is in all prints or I just got a bad one. Checking online I found that the soundtrack is by Goya's Child, of whom I'm now a huge fan. So I guess that's a silver lining to bad audio.Anyway, don't believe the wildly harsh reviews. Just know what you're getting into before you pop in an hour long surreal music video while expecting Mad Max.
Steve
...I'd rate this fourth out of the four I can think of. As Australian post-apocalyptic movies featuring Kurt Cobain's ghost go, Freedom Deep is A-number-one!So I watch bad movies for fun. That's my excuse. After reading the back of the DVD's packaging, which contains the phrase "we see how his talents are nutured (sic) and developed under the guidance of his spiritual mentor - 'Kurt Cobain,'" how could I not buy it? I could not not, that's how. There's another misspelling in the quote above I'd love to reproduce, but IMDb automatically corrects it every time I try.Freedom Deep takes place mostly in two time periods, between which it alternates: 1998-ish and 2018, with a little bit of "much later" as well. The nineties bit concerns a young boy named Liam, who has trouble at home and trouble with the other children at school. And, come to think of it, trouble with his teacher at school, a fact which is revealed in an inadvertently hilarious scene. The other prominent timeline focuses on an adult Liam (who, it should be noted, looks absolutely nothing like young Liam) who basically wanders around the desert a lot. To spice things up, sometimes he wanders through the snow. At one point, in a radical narrative departure, he manages to wander in a boat.Not sold on it yet? Just wait. The best part is that no incarnation of our protagonist, not young Liam, adult Liam or even old Liam, speaks a single word. Not because they're mute, but because it's, y'know, artsy. There's some voice-over here and there, but even that's sparse. I believe it was 28 minutes into the movie before *any* main character actually spoke a word to someone else, and that was through a headset to an unknown party. It's all about as enthralling as it sounds.Freedom Deep is a mess. It's Gordian's Knot, and I have no idea why anybody tied it. So there's this woman. She's a bounty hunter. Or an assassin. Or a government agent or something. I guess it's possible she's from the future of the future. I couldn't tell you. It's 2018, civilization's presumably in crumbles, and for completely unknown reasons she's been tasked with finding Liam wandering out in the desert. Liam's probably wandering the desert to get away from the society that wronged him, except I think that society has been destroyed for close to 20 years at this point. Maybe whatever society sprung up in its place picked on him too. Liam's had it rough. Anyway, she shoots a camel, finds her quarry, has a confusing wireless conversation, burns her headset, rapes Liam at knifepoint (!), they fall in love, and he never says a word. Your typical boy meets girl, really.All the while, she reads through the pages of a book Liam has written. It's the same book Liam started writing back in the 1998 timeline. One would hope that's a helluva book. And clearly it is, as she decides to spare his life because of it; she's convinced it must reach civilization.Meanwhile, young Liam runs away from home and manages to find a surrogate family in the form of a gay couple, half of which is a transsexual "mother" and the other half of which really likes heroin. Liam escapes his troubles, as he always has, through his love of plaid shirts, a horrendous hair-do, Kurt Cobain, and lots of music that sounds nothing like Kurt Cobain's. Music rights cost money. Soon he finds another outlet for his pain (pain best represented in voice-over by the heartfelt words "heal my wounds"). Poetry!The movie states that young Liam's story starts in 1998; we're told no more. Liam endures school and home life, escapes from it, finds an odd replacement family, takes up writing, gets in a series of publications, and becomes well-known enough to get into a meeting with corporate bigwigs who'd like to put his column in their magazine as a regular feature, all by March 12th of 1998, the movie tells us. Even assuming the rest of it started on January 1st, that little dude can move.I have no idea what to make of this movie. I didn't mention how Kurt Cobain really fits in because, well, he doesn't. Why does anyone care what a pubescent mute thinks, at least enough to publish him? Who is sending someone to catch and possibly kill adult Liam? Why? Who does our almost-assassin talk to on her headset? Why does she burn the thing afterwards? Are there wireless towers or satellites after the nuclear holocaust? What the heck happened with the cliff scene? Why does the word "prophet" keep popping up in reference to this movie? If Liam arrives at what looks like a fully intact city at the end, was it really harmed in the first place? Is he just some nutjob wandering around the desert for years and all the rest is his hallucination? Why did the writer-director think he could get away with three versions of a main character who never utters a word? I'm baffled.It's not the worst movie I've seen (I've given out a whole lot of one-star ratings), but it's bad. And it might not be the most confusing movie I've seen, but it's at least top five. As bad movie fare goes, it's entertaining and maybe worth a watch, but isn't a must-see crappy flick experience.In conclusion, let me present a condensed version of what the experience of watching this movie was like:Me: Wait, what?Roommate: I dunno.Me: Rewind it.(Rewind.) (Watch it again.)Together: What?(Repeat.)
astevenson7
This is one of those flicks with great visuals and soundtrack that ya can just sit back and take in. There's some serious undertones and bulk references to pop culture that are just under the surface. A bit like Pink Floyds THE WALL meets HIGHLANDER. The look is also a little MAD MAX. The soundtrack by Goya's Child keeps the momentum and pace. I particularly liked the flashback sequences to the past that are presented in a washed out grainy sort of look that contrast well with the future high tech 35mm scenes. The themes raised touch on religion, homosexuality, parenthood, victimization, ambition, mythology etc. The stars appear to be new comers i.e Peter Benson, Lorelei Garner, Oliver Dutton, Charles Wood, Ross Simmons but performances are solid throughout. The premise concerns an assassin hunting down a prophet poet in the future across the wasteland. We don't really find out exactly who sent her and an uneasy alliance and eventual romance of sorts develops..... A grungy voice over lends an unsettling presence and is the last performance by Harold Baigent the narrator of MAD MAX 2 The Road Warrior.
