The Green Inferno (2014)

Eli Roth's The Green Inferno arrives as a loving reproduction of the Italian cannibal cycle of the late 1970s, which is a curious thing to love. A group of New York student activists flies to the Amazon to chain themselves to bulldozers and stream the results, and the film treats this as an act of vanity long before it treats it as anything else. The plane goes down. The tribe appears. What follows is a patient, extended exercise in gristle.

The production cast heavily from Chile and Argentina, and Lorenza Izzo carries the film with a survivor's blankness. That is where the cultural credit ends. The indigenous villagers exist to shriek, to fondle blonde hair, and to perform a genital mutilation ceremony with no basis in Amazonian practice, a detail somebody might have checked. Environmental concern serves as the ignition switch and nothing more. A petrochemical company and its private militia supply the villains, and corporate greed moves the plot, but the film holds no interest in the system that manufactures such companies. It holds an interest in the meat.

The message, delivered with the subtlety of a dropped anvil, is that uninformed activism harms the people it claims to defend. That is a real observation, made badly, mostly by having the protagonists die for it. Survival International and Amazon Watch objected to the portrayal of uncontacted peoples as savages, and Roth replied that gas companies do not need a movie's permission to destroy a village. He is correct about the gas companies. The film stays a curiosity: a throwback that borrowed the aesthetics of exploitation and inherited the politics along with them. It opened ninth. It earned its gross. The sequel never arrived.