Image source: fandango.com
Trolls Band Together confirms to me Walt Dohrn is essentially the Travis Scott of cinema. At face value, this is an exquisitely curated film, but the vacuous emptiness at its core, like the rest of Dohrn’s oeuvre, is almost unnerving. With Band Together, DreamWorks accomplishes nothing; they create nothing as an artistic venture except for an edgy script cushioned by guttural screaming and random outbursts of violence. Here we have an epic snuff film of the kind renowned film director Edwin S. Porter could only have dreamt of at his Coney Island booth, like a spectacular remodeling of The Electrocution of an Elephant.
When one really examines the script of a Dohrn film, it’s alarming how adept the auteur is at conveying no thoughts, opinions, or worldview other than pure fetishistic spectacle. Even a technically superb film like Band Together comes across as an attempt of AI to merge the works of Pasolini and Busby Berkeley–or rather, to strip these artists of their integrity until they are crass, vulgar, and easy to consume.
At this point in his career— the “Trolls phase”—Dorhn seems dedicated to using an admittedly sophisticated visual language to explore nothing but his own masturbatory fantasies of debased human urges and animal violence as a computerized spectacle-machine. Actually, that’s a pretty good way to describe it. In a barren world, as architect Le Corbusier might say, the chair will become no more than a sitting-machine and the house no more than a dwelling-machine. So, will cinema become no more than a spectacle-machine? It’s all electricity; humming galvanic forces, the firm caresses of the magnetosphere. Purely functional cinema is the operation of an interface of electricity. Someone, please, for God’s sake–turn off the music!
So in conclusion–it’s ok, idk.
