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Out of the Blue
You REALLY better stay off his lawn
2006
Review: April 7, 2009
Director: Robert Sarkies
Starring: Karl Urban, Matthew Sunderland, Lois Lawn, Simon Ferry
If you like, not necessary.
THE SETUP:
Dramatization of a famous shooting rampage that happened in Aramoana, New Zealand in 1990.
DISCUSSION:
It’s amazing what a low price point, when coupled with a picture of a guy with a mustache, can do to be me to buy things. This showed up in a DVD bargain bin for $3, and had a mustachioed Karl Urban on the cover. A quick perusal told me that not only does he have a stache—but he plays a cop in the film, AND it’s about an unprovoked shooting rampage! SOLD! But then it turned out to be about human heroism and pain and wasn’t that interested in exploring the psychology of the killer, so after a while it was just too reverent and dull.
We open with a guy walking along a beach with one of those metal detector things. I don’t really know what this had to do with anything… maybe just to show the quiet daily life of the people of Aramoana, as that is what follows. The place, and some of the people we meet, look pretty poor and raw and rural to me, although maybe I’m just unfamiliar with their standard of living. We soon meet David Gray, our killer, who is talking to a policemen inspecting the interior of his house. We see that there is a chain and padlock around his fridge. Only after a while is it apparent that the policeman is only in Gray’s head. We see some character-setting scenes of various domestic dramas in town, concerning people who will go on to become Gray’s victims, including a guy with various kids from a former wife and a woman he plans to marry, all of whom live nearby and know each other. We see some of these kids laughing at Gray as he peddles his bicycle into town while they speed by in a bus. They won’t be laughing soon!
Gray goes to the bank, where he gets thrown into a rage over a new $2 fee the bank charges for whatever he’s doing. He storms out, and wanders down the street, ranting. He then goes and buys a rifle he finds “nice.” We find out that he lives right next door to the dad with the kids and the new wife, and is piling rocks at the border of their property. He sees a cop at his door, then breaking in—and once more it was just a persecution fantasy. Then one of the girls of the polyandrous dad crosses Gray’s property, and he explodes at her to get off it! When Dad comes out to protest, Gray runs to the fridge, not chained up in reality—and full of guns and ammo! Dad gets gunned down right in front of his daughter! I’ll bet she’s going to be really mindful of property lines in the future.
SPOILERS > > >
Next thing you know, the dad’s house is on fire. People are attracted by the fire, cars slow down… and then Gray comes out and shoots them. There’s an older guy and an even older grandmother, named Helen, who walks with crutches. The guy gets shot, and Helen’s fallen and she can’t get up. She offers to go to her house and call for an ambulance. So she crawls on her stomach all the way to her house—and we seem to follow all of the stupefyingly slow action in real-time—calls, then crawls all the way back. Now, I feel terribly ungenerous, especially once you make it to the end of the movie and see that Helen received a special medal from Queen Elizabeth for acts of extraordinary bravery, and that’s nice, but I just don’t want to spend this much time of a movie watching an elderly woman slowly crawl through the dirt. Once she got back and just kept up with her flap-jawing while the other guy’s life slowly ebbs away, I wrote in my notes “How’d ya like to have a chatty grandmother yakking in your ear as you lay there dying?” Then the ambulance doesn’t come, and Helen crawls back to her house through the dirt AGAIN, although this time the authorities have been alerted and tell her to stay where she is. Good, because noble as she is, I could not spend any more time watching that woman crawl through the dirt.
Now we introduce Karl Urban as Nick, one of the police sent into the thick of the situation. He goes in and soon sees a woman he knows lying shot in the road, but still alive. He can’t go out and help her or risk getting shot, and has to just sit there and endure her staring and pleading with him. He should have just shot her to make it a little less awkward. Meanwhile, Gray paints his face with war paint and leaves his house to take a little stalk around the neighborhood. At one point Nick has a chance to shoot him, but doesn’t. Then we’re back with Helen, and there’s some whole thing I didn’t understand that has her asking someone on the phone how to do something, and the woman replies, and Helen says “But it’s not sanitary!” She then keeps cracking open her fridge for something. I don’t get it. Eventually her dog Patches returns, all bloody, clearly from feasting on human flesh. …Kidding, geez! Then Nick sees a truck go by with a young girl in it who has been shot through the stomach.
The next morning dawns, and SWAT teams gather on the nearby hill and send teams in. A bad filmmaking mistake occurs when we see Gray outside Helen’s window, her cowering inside, and then… it’s late afternoon. Is he still there? Is Helen being terrorized in her kitchen? What’s happening? But the movie never tells us, we’re just left to assume that Gray eventually just moved on. Eventually the SWAT team shoots him, rather uneventfully. We have a short coda where the people of the town who were injured gather in one room of the hospital for support. Then a few notes about the real people and what happened [who got medals, etc.], and that’s it.
< < < SPOILERS END
Unfortunately for those who might have gotten this because they wanted to watch a decent movie, it’s just too tied to the real events—and thus must be too respectful of the real people involved—to make a very good movie anyone not involved would want to watch. We get precious little insight into what’s making Gray tick and what sets him off to go on this spree. Okay, he’s got paranoia issues and he really hates bank fees—is that it? Perhaps the filmmakers feared too much empathy for the killer would dilute from the tales of the survivors? This is my biggest disappointment, but also, once the shooting starts, all that happens is that people hide or get shot. Movies like this walk a fine line where any excitement or technique they employ to get viewers involved risks being labeled exploitive of the tragedy [a charge already leveled against this film], so the filmmakers here try to stay very straightforward and documentary style. And it’s dull. Because of both of these tendencies, the only content that’s allowed to slip through is about the courage, caring and grit of these townspeople and… if you knew the movie was about that, you wouldn’t want to watch, would you? Only residents of Aramoana and New Zealand middle school students would. That’s why I think, it terms of making a movie people might want to watch, they should have made it about a fictional event that is very much like the one in Aramoana, which would have allowed them the freedom to do more with characters, technique and the story. But then they wouldn’t have gotten any money from New Zealand government to make the movie… it’s a trade-off. Nevertheless, if you want insight into nuts who go on killing sprees, watch Elephant. If you live in New Zealand and want to know what happened during this particular killing spree, watch Out of the Blue.
SHOULD YOU WATCH IT?
If you live in New Zealand, and want to know about this particular killing spree. Anyone else should watch Elephant.
