Format: DVD from Sycamore Public Library on gigantic television.
I genuinely don’t like Eli Roth’s films. It’s not just that Roth seems obsessed with gore for gore’s sake, although that’s very much a part of it. It’s that a great deal of Roth’s work is overtly xenophobic. The Hostel movies are in many ways the perfect expression of post-9/11 American nationalism. “Don’t go to Europe and be killed by foreign monsters,” those films say, and the second Hostel compounds this by allowing the main character to avoid her own torture death by buying her way out of it. The Green Inferno is just the same, focused differently. This is a “cannibals in the Amazon” movie, so it’s more xenophobia, but this time, it’s not nationalistic, but overtly racist.
Roth, of course, would deny this charge and would, perhaps correctly claim that a cannibalism story only has a few legitimate places to go. That’s fair, but it doesn’t really change the fact that The Green Inferno presents a world where the indigenous Amazonian tribe is feral and savage and exists entirely in a world where every external threat is viewed as a meal. Even the people who are there to help them and preserve their way of life are nothing more than food, existing only to be treated as savagely as possible before being consumed.
This isn’t any different from how this has been done in the past, of course. The Green Inferno isn’t that much different from The Naked Prey moved to a different continent. The underlying sense of it—white people are captured and abused by backwards natives—is identical. “Don’t do activism,” The Green Inferno says. “If the capitalists don’t shoot you, the natives will eat you.” It’s not a mistake that the character in the beginning of the film who doesn’t go to the Amazon says overtly that (and these are her words, not mine), “…activism is so fucking gay.”
There’s a minimum of plot here, so I’ll get through it as quickly as I can so that all of us can get on with our day. College freshman Justine (Lorenza Izzo) is attracted to a campus activist named Alejandro (Ariel Levy), and is essentially recruited by Jonah (Aaron Burns) to join his group. The group is planning a trip to the Amazon to stop a massive company from clearing a huge part of the forest and displacing a native tribe. The goal is to get to the site, destroy the company’s equipment, and chain themselves to trees, filming the whole thing to raise awareness and global outrage.
It all goes well enough, although Justine is nearly killed by one of the workers. On their celebratory flight home, the engine of their small plane explodes, causing them to crash in the middle of the Amazon jungle. A bunch of people are killed in the crash, and the survivors are immediately set upon by the local tribe—the people they were trying to help. You can guess where it goes from here. Various people are subjected to a variety of horrifying indignities and torture, and are brutalized, hacked apart, and eaten. In one case, one of the survivors is eaten alive, because why not?
At this point, there are going to be some spoilers in the rest of the text. I don’t care about spoiling this film.
Of course we’re going to have a final girl (and it’s not a shock that it will be Justine). We’re also going to need a villain aside from the natives, who are more of a force of nature here than actual antagonists. Who is the villain going to be? Alejandro, of course—the guy who speaks with a clearly “English is not his native language” accent. After all, if you’re going to have a bad guy, you need to have a bad guy who is going to reinforce the xenophobia that the entire film is centered around.
There’s no real point to The Green Inferno beyond exactly what you think the point of the film is. It’s not saying that native people should be left in peace, because the native people are horrifying savages. It’s not saying that you should try to improve the world around you, because the activists who are trying to do so are ultimately terrible people as well and are also easy, stupid victims. It’s not saying that capitalism is bad, either. In fact, while the guys deforesting the Amazon aren’t really good guys, they’re the ones who ultimately save Justine, and who Justine happily throws under the bus at the end.
The fact that this is about cannibalism doesn’t bother me, especially as someone who enjoys zombie films. It’s all about the crass depiction and lowest common denominator sensibilities of Roth, who genuinely shouldn’t be allowed near a camera.
Why to watch The Green Inferno: Scenery?
Why not to watch: It clearly wants to sanitize xenophobia.
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