Besson's last battle is his first

Not since George Lucas blew people’s minds with the first Star Wars film had there been a movie as ambitious as French director Luc Besson’s debut feature The Last Battle, which was released in 1983. His masterpiece The Fifth Element was still 15 years away, but this nugget provides a peephole into the early arc of his storytelling.

And while I’m not saying it has to do with any landmark status, the fact that he did it MOS (mit out sound) and set it in a post-apocalyptic era, makes the whole movie fascinating, and, for lack of any better description, obscurely charming.

In a world populated with savages living amongst the wreckage of a devastated civilization, the plot revolves around the devastation of civilization and issues of brutality, hostility and isolation — not to mention the speech defect of all who had survived.

The opening scenes are rather simple enough, with a lonely man living in an abandoned building. He doesn’t do much of course, and spends most of his time molesting a sex doll and reminiscing about his wife and kid. After a series of loops and turns with some bad guys, our hero is able to make a small airplane and fly to another place where he meets and soon lives, with a kindly old doctor, in a secured makeshift hospital. Before long, he comes across his main antagonist — a deranged freak who tries to kill him at any cost to get inside the doctor’s safe house. Love soon comes to our hero when he meets a captive woman in one of the hospital’s rooms and even as this turns tragic, he wins the battle and war against his enemy and ends up going back to the place where it all began. Don’t you just love bookends?

The film makes for a very interesting style with no dialogue (and being filmed in black and white) and the performances of the actors are quite superb; wherein they showcased their emotions just through rough expressions and body language. I would even go as far to say that had there been any actual words, The Last Battle would’ve lost some of its glow. I believe Besson’s decision for the MOS gives the film that extra punch and originality (a young Jean Reno, in particular, gives credible depth to his tasteless role), although at times, it also does seem a little confusing figuring out the shifts of the first half to the last.

Although beautifully shot as well, the story isn’t quite as affecting emotionally as it is visually. According to David Litton, this examination of the human condition under such circumstances as portrayed in the film isn’t thoroughly engrossing or completely captivating, but Besson does succeed in conveying a brute, animalistic portrait of these men, who must fight for survival through any means, primal or ancestral. I couldn’t agree more. And his vision of a futuristic Earth is absolutely boggling, with mind-blowing vistas and a production design that, although low budgeted and played, still creates a sense of stony dread. It is, in fact, only in the film’s final scene that we have a true sense of hope for mankind’s survival.

Visionary and intriguing for its depiction of a not-so-ridiculous possibility, the movie actually works, and had it not been for a few glitches in some of the characters’ attributes, it could have even be considered a classic. Clever, bold, and not without flaws, The Last Combat won’t hold a candle to the outer space fantasies of George Lucas. Ever. But it does, in its own little way, cater to the image of the legendary war between good and evil; and I guess, that in itself is always a good point to make, isn’t it?

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E-mail: estabillo.matthew@gmail.com.