This might be the worst movie I’ve ever seen.
Dennis Hopper became famous with his directorial effort Easy Rider, which has, honestly, not aged particularly well. It’s more of a cultural artifact than an example of great cinema. The financial success of the film was undeniable, though, and Hollywood decided to keep investing in the new golden boy. They didn’t throw tons of money at him, but enough for him to take a crew to Peru where he built sets and filmed…something.
I think this may be the most distilled example of a movie conceived of, filmed, and edited while super high through the whole process.
It’s obvious that the movie was massively changed in postproduction. The non-linear nature of the story is obviously not intentional, and the movie’s filled with gaps both large and small. There are missing bits of scenes to simply establish what’s going on, who’s talking to whom, and then there’s the gold expedition that starts and ends, but never actually happens.
I don’t know if there’s any way to actually break down this movie into narrative pieces, but there are images, some of them interesting. Like the group of natives who turn the filmmaking process into a sort of religious ceremony after the film crew in the movie packs up and goes back to America. That’s sort of interesting, but Hopper does nothing with it beyond some vague conception that movies are replacing morality and religion, or something. The idea, what little there is of it, is hardly explored and has nothing to do with anything else.
The title of the movie is an issue as well. When releasing a movie that purports to break every convention (including basic sense) and calling it The Last Movie, there’s a heavy implication that this thing is going to change movies forever. It implies a huge ambition to alter the face of cinema, but when the movie comes out as incoherent and unwatchable as this, it becomes a mark of shame. Hopper seemed to shoot so very high but ended up crashing very very low. That disconnect between the film’s ambitions and its actual execution is really what gets me. Hopper simply wasn’t talented enough to pull this off.
While watching, I kept thinking of Orson Welles’ The Other Side of the Wind. Welles, who had spent decades making movies from scraps, decided to throw out convention and build a movie out of pieces he assembled over years (including bits with Hopper). Welles understood storytelling and filmmaking and was able to take the tiny little snippets he collected and assemble them into something cohesive. Hopper is not at that level, tried to do something similar, had no idea what he was doing, and fell completely flat. It reminds me of something a creative writing teaching once told me: If you’re going to break rules, you have to understand them first.
Netflix Rating: 1/5
Quality Rating: 0/4
David Vining, Author 