Something is happening. Something wonderful.
“The Amazing Digital Circus: The Last Act” didn’t screen for critics this week. Normally that might be considered a bad sign but if any movie doesn’t need critics, it’s one that smooshes the last two episodes of an internet phenomenon — whose installments have over a billion views on YouTube (and that doesn’t include Netflix) — into one theatrical feature, which in no way works as its own thing. There’s a brief “previously on” recap but it’s for people who haven’t watched it recently, not newcomers. Newcomers are welcome to join us but if you can’t keep up, that’s on you. The show was free, after all.
For fans, this theatrical event is special. It’s not the first movie based on a hit YouTube series to blow up at the box office, not even in the last month, but unlike the others, it’s more than just “more.” Fans have shared their love of this beautiful, despairing, hilarious, character-driven series online for years, but the cinema is a collective venue. We convene to experience the conclusion of this heart wrenching saga, together, and fill the theater with all our emotions at once. Most of us started watching “The Amazing Digital Circus” on our own screens, probably by ourselves. Now we can finish this journey with everyone else who loves it, in the spirit of genuine community.
It’s an amazing feeling, and “The Last Act” earns it. This is a beautiful finale.
“The Amazing Digital Circus,” created by independent animator Gooseworx and released by the Australian animation studio Glitch, is a modern riff on Harlan Ellison’s 1967 sci-fi/horror short story “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream.” The series takes place in the title locale, a CG-animated realm inspired by a retro video game hub world. Everyone in The Amazing Digital Circus is a real human being who is now trapped in the game, forced to go on terrifying adventures by their cheerful games master, Caine (Alex Rochon), an AI who wants to entertain them, but doesn’t understand their existential terror.
Pop culture is littered with tales of people living out fictional fantasies, dropping into exciting alternate worlds where the novels, tv shows, movies, comic books or video games they love are real. “The Amazing Digital Circus” isn’t one of them. For the humans stuck in Caine’s realm, this is their Hell, and they only have two options: Play along with their tormentor or gradually lose their sanity and eventually “abstract,” transforming into desperate, pathetic, dangerous monsters who cannot die, and instead live forever in darkness. It’s best not to think about their eternal fate too much. If you do, you might abstract.
Over the course of the series, Pomni (Lizzie Freeman) falls into the Circus and goes through a terrible psychological ordeal. Her efforts to alter the game, rescue depressive non-player characters who become self-aware, and maintain her humanity in an environment which sometimes forces her to hunt her fellow prisoners for sport, are usually for naught. Like “Backrooms,” this animated series finds its characters falling between the cracks, in a place they neither understand nor control, coming apart at the seams.
It’s not a thickly-veiled metaphor for the 21st century youth experience, but it doesn’t have to be. It’s powerful nevertheless. What “The Amazing Digital Circus” adds — besides unusually interesting and complex characters — are the futile attempts at distraction. Caine has an all-consuming desire to entertain his guests, and is completely unaware that his superficial worldbuilding, often inspired by nostalgic joys, is barely a distraction from his audience’s inner pain. You can get briefly wrapped up in a pastiche of “Mad Max” and “Candyland” but it does nothing to acknowledge or heal your self-loathing. “The Amazing Digital Circus” is a soulful story about lost souls, stuck with a soulless storyteller.
“The Last Act” includes the last two episodes of the series: “hjsakldfhl” debuted last March, and finds Caine giving up on entertaining his prisoners, who never appreciate all he does for them. So he may as well torture them outright, which seems to be all their getting out of his good intentions anyway, and which might soothe his own existential pain. Pomni and her friends — although “friend” may be stretching it for the chaos gremlin Jax (Michael Kovach), whose violent coping mechanisms are finally failing him — come up with a plan to wrest control away from Caine, which has unexpected and potentially more hellish results.
The final episode, the brand new one, offers a sense of finality. It is not a conventionally happy ending. Just because we love a character, and finally understand who they are, which makes us love them all the more, that doesn’t mean that character ends well. And when the truth about “The Amazing Digital Circus” is finally revealed, more or less, it’s not a triumph. It might break tragic protagonists’ brains all over again.
But the beauty, and that’s not a word I’m using lightly, isn’t in the plot. The plot makes sense, mostly, and it deserves less criticism many other fan-favorite TV finales (COUGHlostCOUGH), and that’s a hurdle many other series finales fail to cross. The beauty is in Gooseworx’s characters, who have grown in wondrous ways, transformed by the the tortures of daily life — for what is their horrific status quo, if not our own? — into people who understand the importance of collective care. They abstract when they retreat into their individual anxieties and sadness. And while they don’t necessarily heal when they connect with one another, they do develop the strength to go on.
That’s why the theatrical release of “The Amazing Digital Circus: The Last Act” is more than an event, or a way to eke money out of an audience who watched all the other episodes gratis. (There is an ad for exclusive merch afterwards, but it’s cute merch, so we’ll let it slide.) Watching “The Last Act” together is, in a powerfully meta way, a real-life version of the story. When a beloved character reveals their innermost secrets, the audible gasp from a person behind you makes a difference. We’re all experiencing the same empathy, the same genuine understanding. We’re not watching a movie or a show, we’re feeling something. Together.
“The Amazing Digital Circus” is an exceptionally entertaining work of art, and it’s anything but escapism. Gooseworx has created a funny and frightening and heartwarming and heartbreaking confrontational masterwork that explores our shared experience of the present, and reveals what a morbid mistake it is to expect the frivolity of the past to heal our current pains. There are always things to nitpick, and creative decisions to debate, but “The Last Act” is an act of somber kindness, to the characters and the audience, which employs classical storytelling when it works, and experimental abstractions when the old saws don’t cut it anymore.
A lot is being said about the transformation the entertainment industry is undergoing, and how suddenly the theatrical experience seems to have changed. It wasn’t sudden. “The Amazing Digital Circus” and “Backrooms” and the rest of their ilk are some of the most popular works of art in the world, and they have been for a long time. The industry as we know it has been ignoring this vital new wave of cinema because they were either too out of touch to see it, or too stuck in their ways to figure out how to exploit it.
Don’t let the studios screw this up for us. Don’t let them steal these powerful new artists away and make them remake old toy commercials. The greatest tragedy would be to turn people like Gooseworx into another Caine, frantically seeking their audience’s approval instead of connecting on personal levels. “The Amazing Digital Circus” matters because it comes from a special place, and makes audiences feel like our 21st century struggles are understood. It makes us feel like our pain matters. Like our identities matter. “The Last Act” makes us feel loved and respected. That’s why we love and respect it right back.
The post ‘The Amazing Digital Circus: The Last Act’ Review: Gooseworx Brings Her Animated Masterpiece to a Powerful Conclusion appeared first on TheWrap.
