Del and Mladen review ‘Fast Color’
Image courtesy of Lionsgate.
“Fast Color” Starring Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Christopher Denham, Lorraine Toussaint and Sanniya Sidney. Directed by Julia Hart. 100 minutes. Rated PG-13. Hulu.
Del’s take
“Fast Color” is pitched as a superhero movie but it is unlike any superhero movie you’ve ever seen, and I would venture to say it is not a superhero movie at all but a story about three women battling forces, both seen and not, that isolate them from the world but bind them as a family.
It is also one of those quiet, semi-science fiction dramas that slip into and out of the stream of pop entertainment garbage so noiselessly that it will not be noticed unless somebody draws attention to it.
As I watched “Fast Color” I thought of Zenna Henderson’s series of books about The People, immigrant aliens who arrive at Earth after their own world is destroyed. I also thought of the Tim Robbins movie “Code 46,” which also came and went without much fanfare but was a fine, overlooked gem of a film.
In “Fast Color,” Ruth (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) is a mother on the run, pursued by Bill (Christopher Denham), a government scientist eager to exploit Ruth’s psychokinetic abilities to cause earthquakes during the seizures that wrack her body. Ruth flees to her mother Bo’s (Lorraine Toussaint) home where Ruth’s daughter Lila (Sanniya Sidney) lives. Bo is raising Lila because Ruth is broken, a poetic way of saying she’s been struggling with substance addiction and other issues. Bo and Lila also have powers – they can take things apart and put them back together. But something that’s broken? It can’t be fixed – not by their telekinetic powers, at any rate.
That theme of brokenness operates throughout “Fast Color” – in Ruth by her moral flaws, Bo by her inability to fix Ruth and even Lila for her life of concealment, something every gay man and woman on the face of the Earth already understands. The government is broken, usually the case in movies where it is made the antagonist, and even the Earth is broken with climate change rendering water a commodity so precious America’s standard of living has descended to something that resembles the Third World.
The movie also tells us that while magic cannot fix things already broken, love may find a way. As the story winds toward its resolution we see Ruth, Bo and Lila seeking their own paths to redemption, with nary a caped crusader, death ray or dollop of the-fate-of-the-universe-lies-in-their-hands bullshit thrown in for dramatic tension.
The movie unfolds at a languid pace, which I felt was sometimes too slow, and reveals its secrets along the way requiring a patient audience. Its scope is limited and simultaneously expansive as it, like “Nomadland,” is set in the parched Southwest with its infinite horizons and empty landscapes.
The best performance of the film – and many of them are good – was by Toussaint as the suffering mother/grandmother Bo. She brought a regal dignity to the role and succeeded in avoiding the clichés and tropes of the put-upon matriarch who would suffer to spare her children.
I did not like the way Hart chose to end the film as it tended to confirm some of those clichés repudiated by everything that led up to the climax – in fact, the climax seemed more of an anticlimax and could have been reworked to provide more subtextual pop.
Still, “Fast Color” will entertain for its 100 minutes and it’s a good antidote to a lot of the nonsense that passes for science fiction in cinema these days.
I would grade it at a B+.
Mladen’s take
I enjoyed “Fast Color,” though it is incorrectly billed, as Del correctly noted.
That the streaming service, producers, studio, whoever or whatever, tried to sucker me with the claim the film is a science fiction adventure doesn’t bother me too much. “Fast Color” is a good, girl relationships movie with occasional doses of a superpower on exhibit. The superpower, by the way, comes in two flavors: controllable by its practitioner or beyond control.
The three women in the film have brains with the capability to deconstruct and reconstruct objects. When our heroines explode objects into millions of sand grain pieces and return those grains to their original uniform form, the process comes with bright, streaking stripes of color.
Best as I can tell, our heroines use the word “color” in their conversations as code for their power. “She sees colors.” “I can’t see colors.” “Does anyone else beside us three see colors?”
Bo, Ruth, and Lila have to talk carefully because they recognize that there are a whole bunch of people on the rain-starved Earth of the future who would try to weaponize their telekinesis, rather than do good with it.
Also, best as I can tell, our heroines are mortal. So, they could be snubbed by the Government if deemed a threat or some Trump-loving nationalistic fascist racist patriot citing God as his source of inspiration and authorization to cancel from the world the un-godly as he defines them.
Personally, though, had I fast color, I wouldn’t be cowering from the billions of stupid people on this planet. I’d discern ways to let those reds, greens, and blues rip to achieve world peace while I worked toward enabling the power to allow me to live forever so that I could travel to edge of the universe.
I can’t recall the soundtrack for “Fast Color,” which is good and bad. Bad in the sense that the score, at least to me, failed to add to the film. Good in that the music didn’t distract the plot. I did enjoy the song about a new day coming about halfway through the film.
“Fast Color” has a pleasantly subdued dystopian feel. The world is dry as in “Mad Max: Fury Road,” but there’s no hyperviolence among warring tribes. In fact, there’s very little violence in “Fast Color.” The director conveys desperation and dearth by showing poor pickins’ on store shelves. More effective is the unceasing reminder that the water well is going dry. Water is ladled into and out of plastic containers marked with red for maximum volume, usually about half of the actual capacity of a jug. There must be no spillage. Check into a motel and you pay for the room and the water. Faucets are useless, bathing wasteful.
However, the reason I give “Fast Color” a B+ like Del is this: Though essentially a girl movie, there’s almost no romance. The lack of romance allows me to forgive the studio for lying about the film’s true genre.
Mladen Rudman is a former journalist and technical writer. Del Stone Jr. is a former journalist and author.
All day long the weather radar showed angry swaths of red marching toward us, an evil horde of lightning, thunder and terror bent on reducing us to protoplasmic mulch.
I tried to ignore the shrieked warnings – “He’s coming to get you, Barbara” – but eventually it became impossible to resist and even I looked.
Tornadoes. Thunderstorms. Hurricane-force winds.
So I told Mom I’d be over that night in case her power went out. At that point I was really, really, really wishing she’d bought that Generac but what to do? In due time I suppose.
So at 9 I trudged to Mom’s as the Line of Death nudged Pensacola on the radar screen.
Except the Line of Death became potholed with gaps and green areas and within an hour there was no line, just a disconnected string of light rainshowers. No lightning. No thunder. No Cantore fodder at all. I told Mom I was going home, that I wanted to sleep in my bed so I wouldn’t become a zombie at work the next day.
When I got home, I made the mistake of firing up the interwebs before hitting the hay and after half an hour it became obvious the Line of Death was getting its act back together.
I stayed up until 1 a.m. hoping it would all just go away, but it didn’t. Soon the wind was roaring and the rain pummeling. I could hear a constant thumping of objects bashing against the roof. I hoped poor Mom was sleeping through all this. It’s the thunder and lightning she hates, but this would no doubt give her a gray hair or two if she knew it was happening.
I entered a fretful sleep and woke up at 3 to hear the tumult continue. It was hurricane-like. Finally at 5 a.m. it slackened.
This morning the yard is littered with dead limbs and leaves. All my hard yardwork is for naught. Mom did in fact sleep through it, but guess what: I was a total zombie at work. A slab of dead meat sitting in that chair. I bet I sleep tonight.
About the author:
Del Stone Jr. is a professional fiction writer. He is known primarily for his work in the contemporary dark fiction field, but has also published science fiction and contemporary fantasy. Stone’s stories, poetry and scripts have appeared in publications such as Amazing Stories, Eldritch Tales, and Bantam-Spectra’s Full Spectrum. His short fiction has been published in The Year’s Best Horror Stories XXII; Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine; the Pocket Books anthology More Phobias; the Barnes & Noble anthologies 100 Wicked Little Witch Stories, Horrors! 365 Scary Stories, and 100 Astounding Little Alien Stories; the HWA anthology Psychos; and other short fiction venues, like Blood Muse, Live Without a Net, Zombiesque and Sex Macabre. Stone’s comic book debut was in the Clive Barker series of books, Hellraiser, published by Marvel/Epic and reprinted in The Best of Hellraiser anthology. He has also published stories in Penthouse Comix, and worked with artist Dave Dorman on many projects, including the illustrated novella “Roadkill,” a short story for the Andrew Vachss anthology Underground from Dark Horse, an ashcan titled “December” for Hero Illustrated, and several of Dorman’s Wasted Lands novellas and comics, such as Rail from Image and “The Uninvited.” Stone’s novel, Dead Heat, won the 1996 International Horror Guild’s award for best first novel and was a runner-up for the Bram Stoker Award. Stone has also been a finalist for the IHG award for short fiction, the British Fantasy Award for best novella, and a semifinalist for the Nebula and Writers of the Future awards. His stories have appeared in anthologies that have won the Bram Stoker Award and the World Fantasy Award. Two of his works were optioned for film, the novella “Black Tide” and short story “Crisis Line.”
Stone recently retired after a 41-year career in journalism. He won numerous awards for his work, and in 1986 was named Florida’s best columnist in his circulation division by the Florida Society of Newspaper Editors. In 2001 he received an honorable mention from the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association for his essay “When Freedom of Speech Ends” and in 2003 he was voted Best of the Best in the category of columnists by Emerald Coast Magazine. He participated in book signings and awareness campaigns, and was a guest on local television and radio programs.
As an addendum, Stone is single, kills tomatoes and morning glories with ruthless efficiency, once tied the stem of a cocktail cherry in a knot with his tongue, and carries a permanent scar on his chest after having been shot with a paintball gun. He’s in his 60s as of this writing but doesn’t look a day over 94.
Contact Del at [email protected]. He is also on Facebook, twitter, Pinterest, tumblr, TikTok, and Instagram. Visit his website at delstonejr.com .