Jeremy Saulnier's New Netflix Movie Is Extremely Tense Rebel Crest sits firmly in the action category. But where successful, stylish action films like the john wick series either The HiGH&LOW movies They make the most of the over-the-top action stunts and face-offs. Rebel Crest They are simple and stylized enough to look completely believable.
Saulnier's previous notable films include Blue ruin and Green room They handle violence in a graphic and bloody way, but they ground bloody conflicts in reality. Rebel Crest It's more of a box office success than those movies in terms of direction and ending. But still, the fights are… As Saulnier repeatedly put it in a trailer with Polygonconsciously and intentionally “careless.”
“I can watch an action hero take down an entire building of people and be impressed by the stunt work,” says Saulnier. “The choreography is mind-blowing and I love going on that journey. But I don’t really feel I don't feel much of the harrowing nature of what one might experience when confronting another human being. So with (Rebel Crest“In choreography, I was always there to thwart the stunt team's efforts to make things cooler, bigger, more satisfying. Like, 'Tone it down a bit!' or 'I don't think that's going to happen!' I was always there to, like, make it sloppy and weird.”
(Editor's note: Spoilers ahead for Rebel Crest.)
Rebel Crest stars The Underground RailroadAaron Pierre plays Terry Richmond, a black Navy veteran and martial arts instructor who visits a small southern town to bail his cousin out of jail. He's on a tight deadline and his cousin's life is on the line, but the local white police begin harassing him as soon as he arrives in town, stealing his bail money under the guise of civil asset forfeiture and threatening him with jail or worse if he resists.
Terry is a polite, cautious and measured man. It is difficult to see Rebel Crest Without thinking about Ta-Nehisi Coates Between the world and me and other notable writings by and about Black parents having “the talk” with their children Terry is clearly familiar with that dynamic and the importance of staying calm even in the midst of outrageous taunts and open harassment, and yet it's obvious that at some point he's going to snap and fight back at the injustice and abuse being heaped upon him by the police, particularly local police chief Sandy Burnne (Don Johnson).
The entire film is one long, tense wait to see what straw will finally break Terry's back. And there is a natural expectation that, like Sylvester Stallone's similar military veteran in the 1982 film, First bloodDealing with equally out-of-bounds small-town cops, Terry is going to leave a cathartic trail of bodies in his wake when he finally lets go of his control.
But Saulnier did not want to Rebel Crest ending with a wave of dramatic neck-snapping and pulverized bodies: he wanted “a traditional American action movie, ideally with more art.” And he wanted Terry to feel vulnerable.
“Aaron, the stunt team and I worked closely together. I did my research and saw how martial arts disciplines play out in the real world,” says Saulnier. “It’s mostly sloppy grappling and brute strength. There’s certainly a lot of technique and knowledge, but a lot of it is about leverage and positioning, and not so much about fancy moves. The cable work never came into play, except for a couple of things to help take the weight off people. I leaned on my strength, which is an uncomfortable reality, and through that, a more real battle space and more real hand-to-hand combat. And through that, for me, a bigger dramatic outcome, a bigger emotional experience than these kinds of big spectacle movies.”
Image: Netflix
Saulnier laughs a little in our interview as he suggests that his stunt team didn’t fully understand why he was opposed to traditional action until they saw the finished film. “We finally screened it for the crew in New Orleans last week, and I think they realized what I was going for: the subjective, emotionally charged experience of Terry Richmond fighting his way through these adversaries,” he says.
“There was one occasion where we had some choreography that was pretty impressive and I was in the editing room watching it. And I felt really proud of the work we did, as an MMA fan and a person who has done way more research into combat than I care to admit. But it didn’t feel real. So some of the coolest choreography ended up getting cut, because if it didn’t feel completely real, based on Aaron’s physicality and who he was up against, they had to cut it. Which was painful, but rewarding. The note to the stunt team was something like: We're paying homage to so many films, but we need to forge our own path and make this its own genre..”
Part of that big emotional payoff was giving Terry and his allies in the film a more positive ending than fans of Saulnier’s other work might expect. “I think people will be surprised, when they finally see this film, by the level of nuance and layers that are there, and the predicaments that everyone is in,” Saulnier says. “I’m not excusing any kind of behavior, but I’m just understanding why humans are in such conflict, and I hope to offer a bit of catharsis, which is new for me. You know, I’m used to a movie giving you a terrible punch in the gut, leaving the audience in a state of shock or dread. And this film, I think, transcends that boundary. We’ve had almost euphoric responses. When you hear people in a theater experiencing this film together, it’s been really heartening and strangely uplifting.”
Rebel Crest It's streaming on Netflix now.
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