A
pair of bare feet walk on the green earth, followed by a smaller set of bare
feet. The camera pans up to a middle-aged man and a young boy, both adorned in
tribal jungle dress, walking through the jungle. A loud roar, and the camera
shows us a yellow tractor destroying neighboring trees. These two contrasts of
leaving footprints on the earth open Eli Roth’s The Green Inferno.
Eli Roth is one of the few horror directors who likes to
address social issues while doing it through gut-wrenching, mind-bending horror
and gore. His film The Green Inferno
is no different. Whereas in Hostel I &
II, he explored capitalism vs
morality, here Roth examines activism vs preservation, as exampled against the
backdrop of cannibalism.
Lorenzo Isso plays Justine, a
college freshman who becomes enamored with the older Alejandro (Ariel Levy), an
activist who is raising a group to go to the Amazon rainforest to protest the
destruction of South America’s virgin landscape. The plan is simple: gather
some likeminded people, film the logging company and its militia (yes, militia)
with their camera phones, and shoot the image simultaneously around the world
via satellite.
In order to sneak in so close to the
logging team they have to get in unseen the best they can. They do this by
acquiring similar looking yellow jumpsuits and hardhats. If they can accomplish
this, these college students from New York will help prevent the destruction of
the South American rainforest and show the world that preservation is worth
facing death. What follows is an intense scene where the viewer wonders if these
activists are ready to lay down their lives.
Later the young people are on the
way home in their jet when their only engine on the single-engine plane fails,
and they crash. Soon after, the remaining survivors are captured by an indigenous
tribe who bring the students—still wearing the logging-company yellow jumpsuits—into
their village. Of course, neither the New Yorkers nor the natives speak the
same language, but it doesn’t matter: what is clear is that the tribe is going
to preserve their culture, even at the cost of the lives of these WASP
activists who intended to do the same.
It’s more than just miscommunication
here, but misperception. Alejandro wants to feel important, like he’s making a
difference, and although Justine comes along, the viewer is a bit unsure if she
wants to go along to make Alejandro happy, if she really wants to make some
change in a region she only reads about, or if she wants to shake the coattails
of her senator father and be her own person. These are all noble ideals.
However, so are all the ideals of young, impressionable college students who
see their whole lives before them, and have to jump now at an opportunity that
may never come again. The tribal village (who we soon learn are cannibals) know
only the life they’ve ever known, and truly want to preserve, and seeing the
latest newcomers wearing the all-too-familiar clothing of those destroying
their civilization only enhances their resolve.
Roth keeps the intensity goes by
having the tribe painted red, which looks eerily similar to the blood on the
survivors. When it becomes apparent that they are prisoners awaiting their
turns at becoming the next meal, they are faced with desperation in the
possibility of escape or being caught and tortured before being eaten. As
stated earlier the idea here is that this isolated, uncontacted group of
aboriginal people know their days are numbered, but are trying to keep their
way of life. The cannibalism in the film is always aimed at outsiders
threatening their civilization, and never turned at themselves. However, when
the young protagonists arrive in the jungle, things constantly get worse for
them because they really don’t know what they’re doing. They not activists so
much as they are students projecting the idea of activism. If they knew this
was the culture they were preserving, would they have been as ambitious to
undertake this mission? Which one is deadlier: the logging company destroying
countless numbers of precious trees, and hence ecosystems, for money, or a
primitive people who not only approve, but desire the consumption of the flesh
of foreigners who threaten their way of life? Like with Roth’s other films
there is no easy answer, yet instead of just letting us ponder the result, he
shows us in the most graphic, uncomfortable ways that what is at stake does not
have an easy solution. He makes us think. The
Green Inferno is visceral and disturbing just as movies sometimes need to
be.
