Just got done watching "Promised Land" against my will. I knew it would be utter bullsh*t and it did not let me down. Yes, this is yet another one of mrs. trapeze's movie picks. Truth be known, she is responsible for picking the lion's share of crappy movies for us to watch...it's a gift or talent or something. Me? I can smell a stinker from miles away and "Promised Land" had putrid written all over it. Flies were circling this veritable shopping bag of dog excrement.
"Promised Land" is the infamous anti-fracking movie from the skull cavity of Matt Damon. That was enough to warn me off of it right there but mrs. trapeze is damned stubborn about her crappy movie selections and I am putting down markers for better, cooler movies that will be coming out soon. So, putting up with this little bit of exquisitely hand crafted garbage is a small price to pay for getting my way, in spades, later.
So...what is the basic theme of this movie? Is it that fracking is bad? Is it that big corporations are evil? Well, yeah, of course those things are a big part of this movie. But no...the basic and overarching theme of this movie is that people from the country are total dipsh*ts. Yeah, we've seen this movie so many times before where people from flyover country are pretty much made out to be morons and this movie takes that theme and runs with it. Hard.
An energy company comes to town to hand out money, a lot of it, to anyone and everyone who owns property. Now this is not the way it works in the real world, of course...there are these things called mineral rights and a lot of people who own property do not own the mineral rights to that property. I have certainly seen that happen both in Colorado and in Texas. But put that aside. The big company comes to town and starts offering what amounts to a lifetime of wealth to the people there and what do they do? They turn their collective noses up at it. They decide to vote on it as if the majority of property owners could somehow prevent the others from leasing their properties out. But mainly they treat opportunity as a curse. Yeah, right. No one is going to turn down the opportunity to be financially self sufficient, to be wealthy. No one. But these rednecks? They are ready to stand up to that energy company and fight for their right to live in poverty and most likely lose their homes and farms some day. The dialogue is pathetic (I couldn't find direct quotes so my paraphrasing is just going to have to suffice here)...
Ignorant Rednecks: "We aren't going to just let your company take our land, mister!"
Patient Energy Company Rep: "Uh, no...we are going to pay you handsomely for the privilege of putting in a gas well but only if you just happen to want gobs of money for basically sitting around and watching while we do all of the work...you may refuse our offer and keep living like trailer trash if that is your desire."
Ignorant Rednecks: "Damned straight! Now get off our land...hey, who has a beer?"
The characters are as unbelievable as the plot. Matt Damon plays the part of some kind of junior executive with the energy company and he starts out as being mostly professional in his attitude about what he is there for (to sign contracts with property owners) and about his attitude toward his company. Several times at the beginning and once in the middle of the film he pretty much lays it out truthfully about the reality of things: "Here is an opportunity to make a lot of money with almost zero downside. Please, for the sake of your children, don't be stupid." But then he starts to get nostalgic about his young life on the farm and inexplicably starts to see things from the redneck point of view. As the left likes to say, he grows. Uh, yeah...he grows into a stupid idiot.
The energy company then also becomes inexplicably stupid. They send in a fake environmentalist who then uses faked tales of fracking nightmares that supposedly happened in Nebraska. Now here is where things really spiral out of control as far as the plot goes. At the beginning of the movie there is quite a bit of fun made of some stupid ass (redneck) politician who seems to be the only guy in town who can't make proper use of the internet to look up basic facts about natural gas deposits. So now, when presented with a story of a fracking apocalypse in Nebraska, everyone in town who could previously use Google somehow forgets that that is an option and just accepts the wacko environmentalist's story as fact. Not a single person in town bothers to check the story out and instead let the creep pound signs into their yards that show dead cows strewn about and that tell the energy company to "go home." Sure. Well, it gets worse. The energy company doesn't let Matt Damon in on their trick. They send him some info that allows him to think that he can prove the enviroweenie is lying and he runs with it. But then Matt Damon, genius that he is, figures out* that the whole thing is a setup. He starts to look like he is thinking very deeply about very important and deep thoughts. Oooo...suspense! Then at a big town meeting Matt Damon blows the lid off of the energy company's evil machinations and tells everyone that it's all been a big old nasty energy corporation trick! Zoiks! Rednecks get all angry and tear up their contracts and throw those nasty old energy company people out of town! Yay! The town is saved!
I'm serious as a heart attack, here...that is really the plot and that is really how the movie ends. The big "scandal" is not that fracking is going to destroy their homes and leave them penniless and living in a toxic wasteland. That was the movie that Matt Damon wanted to make. Very, very badly wanted to make. But the problem is that it would then have ceased to be a drama and instead it would have been a fantasy. And that's because there is literally zero truth to any of the "fracking is bad and it kills" nonsense. Fracking doesn't do anything except extract a butt load of energy from the earth that otherwise could not be gotten. So Matt Damon had to come up with a ridiculous and nonsensical "scandal" that would make the energy company the evil corporate bad guy anyway. So here it is: The "scandal" or the "conspiracy" was that the energy company had to trick the poor, stupid country bumpkins into getting rich because they were too damned stupid to do it without manipulation. But fortunately Matt Damon was there to shut them down! Oh, and he threw his career away, too, because the energy company immediately fired his stupid ass but that's okay because he is going to stay in the backward little redneck community and shack up with a school teacher he met in a bar once and talked to a couple of times.
Yeah, that's how it happens in the real world. Sure.
This movie is made for dumbass urban libs who believe all of the left wing talking points without question. And that's the irony here. The real stupid people here are the ones who think that light comes out of the switch on the wall, that milk comes from the grocery store and that electric cars are "green." The target audience for this BS are people who think that recycling actually helps the environment (it almost never does), that the war on terror is over and that the polar bears need to be saved from drowning...that something must always be done.
Thank goodness that Matt Damon grew at just the right moment and foiled the evil plans of the energy company so that several hundred rednecks could continue to live on unemployment and disability! Being a one percenter sucks! Who needs money? We have dirt! Yay!
And for the record, as is so often the case, mrs. trapeze said, after the movie was over, "You were right, that was awful." I appreciate that I don't have to say, "I told you it would suck."
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*Okay, well he didn't really figure it out. The energy company sent him a bigger picture of the Nebraska dead cows and there is a lighthouse in the background with a circle around it and a big arrow pointing to it. OMG! That farm isn't in Nebraska! It's in Louisiana! Just for fun I looked up Louisiana lighthouses and if there is one anywhere near a place that cows wouldn't be underwater I didn't see it. The internet thing is kinda cool, eh?
