"Hotel Artemis" - A Review and Cyberpunk Analysis
Silver Spook AKA Christian Miller
Hotel Artemis is a cyberpunk indie film tour-de-force that got nowhere near the recognition
it deserves, slipping under a lot of radars, including mine. So here's me doing my small part to remedy that.
Hotel Artemis, written and directed by longtime
franchise writer Drew Pearce, takes place ten years in the future, where riots
over water privatization have ravaged Los Angeles. The Nurse (Jodie Foster)
runs a high-security secret hospital for criminals that hovers precariously on
the brink of chaos, bound by a heaping helping of anonymity and trust.
Artemis shares a lineage with Bladerunner in that it is a
British auteur's cyberpunk vision using the Art Deco husk of Los Angeles as a scaffolding
to layer a dystopian hi-tech future onto. In 1982 it was Ridley Scott that set his way across the pond, and this time, it's Drew Pearce, writer on
Iron Man 3, Mission Impossible 2, making his directorial debut.
Hotel Artemis has 'cyber' in spades. It's got the hi-tech
microwave scalpels cutting open low-life bank heisters. It's got hi-tech Black
Mirror-esque cornea-implanted video cameras that get 8G reception through
meters of reinforced steel. It's got low-life Molly Millions razorgirl-analogs
using said ocular cameras to make snuff films for lower-life well-heeled pervs,
two thousand miles away via satellite livestream.
It's a film unstuck in time. Jodie Foster plays a
septuagenarian once-hippy turned-diehard-urban den-mother, known as
"Nurse". She awakens to the Papa's "California Dreamin" on
an archaic record player. After getting a frumpy grandma-cardigan that's as
time-faded and threadbare as a Velveteen Rabbit, she goes to work playing Neil
Young's "Helpless" on a cassette tape -- slightly less archaic than
the record player by two decades, give or take. She listens to 60's
counterculture rock on 80's lo-fi in the 40's-style Hotel revamped into a
2028-future hospital for LA's criminal underbelly, complete with 3D liver
printers and eye-rebuilding medicinal nanotech.
There's an exquisite layering of time periods, strata of
technology and culture existing naturally on top of each other -- with the
newfangled gizmos as just a sci-fi icing on a fully-realized world-cake. This
degree of verisimilitude is perhaps the greatest achievement of Hotel Artemis
that few cyberpunk sci-fi or speculative fiction works ever manage. Most
instead hyperfocus on The Astounding Capital-F Future's Blasters Holodecks and FTL
Spaceships as in trad- space-centric sci-fi, or the shiny badass cyberarms,
flying cars, wired, biochips and trodes in every orifice, cyan-and-magenta
Photoshop filtered generic Tokyo-scape, and 100 foot holo-geishas as in schlock
cyberpunk.
Artemis' degree of lived-in, thought-through speculative
realism alone, more than makes up for some of the wandering story and
under-utilized tensions and actors oft complained about in other reviews. But
add to this several endearing performances, and a 'soul-first, money-later'
spirit that permeates the entire picture, and it's clear there's a
future-cult-gem of neo-noir genius buried beneath a tidalwave of mainstream
audiences disappointed they didn't get a generic marvel movie, or critics paid
by the actual Wolf Kings of Hollywood and the entertainment-industrial-complex,
who have certain members of Hotel Artemis cast on, if not the black list, the
'very dark grey' list.
(Pearce has himself acknowledged that he had specifically
gone into 'Artemis' with the mantra, 'this is an indie film that not everyone
will like, but some people will love it to death' - in particular his seventeen
year old self. My seventeen year old self stands in solidarity!)
Obviously this resonates with me, having spent 2 ½ years
working on Neofeud, a cyberpunk adventure game labor of love that is quite
decidedly not for everyone. Firstly, a LucasArts / Sierra-style point-and-click
that is niche AF, and secondly the 'postmodern impressionism' art style I was
aiming for is admittedly love hate. But for my own twenty year old angsty
Gibson-guzzling, Bladerunner binging and Deus Ex-devouring self, Neofeud
would've been the best thing on the planet.
As a native Hawaiian, I'm intimately
familiar with hotels (and I also have issues with aspects of Big Tourism that's
colonized my homeland but that's one of my frequently digressed digressions so
feel free to binge that rant elsewhere in my 'Tube catalogue of extended
livestreamed diatribes).
Hotels are sanctuaries from the daily grind of dayjob
drudgery. They're places of luxury -- exclusive clubs for a wealthy, privileged
elite, and if you've the rare fortune to have a stable job with mysterious
things called, 'vacation time', you average Joe or Jane might get to visit an
economy-class hotel, two weeks out of a year, if you're lucky. Hotels are places of anonymity -- also a
privilege in our world of Big Brother-centric surveillance capitalism and AI
where Facebook, Google and China are in an arms race to build automated
wardrone skynets and train world-dominating economic Hal 9000's with your every
text message selfie-cammed micro expression, and online purchase.
But in this fairytale land called 'Richistan', that has
none of that, that houses World Economic Forums in reclusive Swiss mountain
ranges, idyllic Waikiki penthouse sunsets and private beaches. In this
'Elysium' of the elite no one asks questions when you walk in on the red carpet
and check in, and the concierge would be remiss to give away patron data.
Hotels are homes for the moneyd homeless. The
post-geographical cosmopolitan jet-setters doing Goldman Sachs bidding over
powerlunches, smuggling Ono Sendai hacker decks and Maas-Biotek prototypes in
titanium briefcases, or assassinating corporate big-wigs (the latter is the
business of certain Hotel Artemis' members).
Hotels are a country whose name is opulence, whose national past-times
are, 500 dollar hookers, high-thread-count sheets and four-star room service,
whose citizenship card is a platinum rectangle with the word VISA on it, whose
anthem is neoliberal doctrine, and whose membership requires fealty to
megabanks, megacorporations, and the megarich -- all of which are fundamentally
criminal entities, not unlike the occupants of Hotel Artemis.
Cyberpunk is criminals working for bigger criminals, and
Hotel Artemis has that in spades also.
Hotels are for those who do Nice, Honolulu, and Acapulco
in a span of 48 hours.
According to Pearce, the initial inspiration came from
visiting LA during the California droughts. Two years later, Flint Michigan
taps spouting lead and carcinogens, 37 US cities and over 3000 communities in
America without potable drinking water as part of our cyberpunk dystopian
present, and Hotel Artemis is barely science fictional.
Is Hotel Artemis cyberPUNK?
Yes, there are punk elements.
The most punk aspect of Artemis is undoubtedly the Jodie
Foster character.
We discover that the 'Nurse', through musical tastes,
ideological choices and backstory, is fundamentally a child of the original
subversive movements of the 60's -- the Civil Rights Movement, the spiritual
predecessor of punk before it was suppressed, destroyed and co-opted by 'The
Man' as the boomers called it then. Dr. Martin Luther King famously said,
shortly before taking a 30-06 round to the head, that 'There can be no racial
equality without economic equality'. And then, as Rage Against The Machine says
in The Matrix' credit's song, 'Then came the shot'.
A single working parent without a high school diploma
could support a family of four with food, adequate housing, and healthcare in
the mid-20th century in America. As we all know, that 'golden age of
aquarius' has been in steep decline ever since, with half of the country at or
near poverty, and millenials with Ph. Ds barely scraping by at Starbucks, uberdriving,
dog-walking, and instacart gig-economy jobbing just to afford a closet above a
methlab or a 'cyberpunk' coffin apodment at age 37 like Seattlites in Amazon's
home city. The technically savvy are programming in sardine-packed into flop
houses, attempting to be the next startup / crypto Zukerberg, or win the
killer-app Hunger Games before the Go-Fund Me for their insulin dries up. (Fun
fact: the average family of four in the US now pays around 30,000 for health
insurance BEFORE being slammed with countless hidden fees and charges.
Outrageous healthcare costs are a #1 reason cited by teachers striking like
wildfire across the nation)
Hotel Artemis functions as an exclusive healthcare club,
an exclusive 'potable water club' and exclusive high-security home for wealthy
criminals who've enriched themselves looting other people (and sometimes
killing them). It's quite resonant to the cyberpunk present we live in, in
which a criminal business and political elite have robbed the majority of us
blind and left us to rot like a homeless runaway teenager bleeding out from a
drug deal gone bad in a ghetto with poison for tap water.
Foster's Nurse is that good Samaritan, who took in those
desperate and dying street kids, healed their wounds, and served as a surrogate
parent. That is the relationship that Bautista's character, Everest, the
hulking orderly, has with Nurse. He will smash your face in with his medikit,
but he's like a giant little kid with her. It is one of the strongest
chemistries of the film, a believable adopted mother-son relationship, right down
to Nurse telling Everest to 'take the long way to get some exercise' when she
has him kick an unruly guest out of the Hotel. ("Visiting hours are
never!" -- Bautista has all the best zingers)
Everest is no stranger to the violence and the brutality
of American street-level poverty. He reminds the clientele that he is a
'certified healthcare professional' and if you talk about fight-club- sorry.. I
mean the clandestine criminal hospital, Everest will hunt you down and
'un-heal' your ass.
At the same time, Everest is completely loyal and cares
deeply about nurse -- always addressing her respectfully with 'yes nurse' even
when he disagrees -- because she was the only who was there for him when he was
lost in the brutal concrete jungle of cyberpunk dystopia that is the US present
and future.
It later becomes apparent Foster's character had taken in
countless other street kids, like Everest, and had worked to heal the
healthcare-less at a free clinic, until it was shut down.
This aspect of Hotel Artemis personally resonated the
most with me, as someone who grew up a person of color in a US ghetto. I later
went on to become a STEM teacher for inner-city kids and a social worker. Fundamentally,
I was a surrogate parent for countless homeless, marginalized, parentless
children whos parents were zonked out on meth, incarcerated, or just working so
many jobs to keep the family afloat they just weren't around. These kids I was
working with were like Everest, who saw their only possible future as becoming
a drugdealing criminal, an Ice Cube-like rap star, or both. They were all
striving to follow the footsteps of the Wolf King and the rest of the Hotel
Artemis' residents -- as affluent globetrotting badasses. But the reality was
they'd mostly end up in the prison-industrial complex making Whole Foods
products and fighting California wildfires for 72 cents an hour.
I worked with several foster parents, many of them
aging-hippy white ladies just like Jodie Foster's character. One in particular,
she had the same frazzled grey hair, faded tye dye so ancient it might've
survived Woodstock. I was teaching a Lego Robotics class to about ten kids,
many from low-income housing and foster kids -- there were two Native
Hawaiians, a few Filipinos, mixed-race, and an African American. Side note:
Bautista is half Filipino half Greek, and grew up in poverty in one of the most
horrifically unequal areas of the US --
Washington DC. Bautista once recalled himself and his sister surviving for a
week on a pot of burned beets with their single mother.
A lot of the kids I was teaching gave me flak and
insisted on pretending to be Kanye West and trying to rap battle me (I
occasionally obliged them and had to kick their butt to settle them down and
win some respect). But eventually, we got to working on building Lego robotic
arms (cause you've got to prime kids to grow up cyberpunks early!) I helped
them engineer and program self-driving Lego cars, beating Tesla and Google to
the punch by a decade.
But at the end of the first class, this old white lady in
her Birkenstocks and a frayed old flower-sweater, very much like Jodie Foster's
character came in through the door.
"Ok boys, time to go!" she said. And about 2/3
of the class got up saying, "Yes, mom" in a tone just like Dave
Bautista's "Yes, nurse", and all the black and brown kids all flocked
to her and gave her a big group hug.
Everest's and Nurse's relationship is really the soul of
this movie, and it is more true to reality than almost anything I've seen in
the cyberpunk and adjacent genres. While American cinema and AAA games often
demonize or glamorize criminals, (the latter is common in cyberpunk), most
actual 'criminals' in my experience are people who are 'prisoners of their own
devices' as a certain Eagles song about a hotel goes. They're people with
limited options, often due to poverty or marginalization, forced to try to
survive by often illegal means. Whether that's robbing banks, selling drugs or boosting
cars (one of the smartest kids I taught was a literal grand theft auto convict
who grew up poor and brown). 'Poverty is the worst form f violence' as Ghandi
correctly put it. It isn't glamorous, it is ugly, and it is wrong. It is a
wrong done to millions of people, a particularly egregious wrong in the richest
country on Earth like the US.
The work to remedy is also as unglamorous and
often unnoticed as a little drab frazzly grey-haired old lady -- but it is the
real work. Jeff Goldblum plays the Wolf King 'owner of half of LA' and there's
a scene where Nurse is healing his wounds, and she refers to him as 'just
another ex-con hippy who traded beads for bullets'. In that moment the history
of America, perhaps the world, is boiled down to a microcosm. Six decades have
passed since the Assassination of JFK and King, and one flower child his sold
out, bought into 'greed is good' mantra of the 80's and made billions of
dollars profiting as the country falls into squalor, the environment burns,
water riots and chaos dominate. The other is still doing the hard but necessary
social work of providing for those less fortunate even when it was 'uncool', was
the safety net for those falling through the gaping cracks, healing the
healthcareless. If the ratio of true-punk nurses to sell-out Wolf Kings were
greater, we'd probably be in less of a global mess, right now.
Sterling K.
Brown plays Waikiki, a bank heister and his relationship with his less-competent
drug-addicted brother is another strong point. The brother gets them in trouble
and nearly gets them killed on multiple occasions, but Waikiki stays by his
side.
But on top of the heavy subtance, Artemis practically
oozes style and flair. There are a fair share of action including Mexican
standoffs with 3D printed guns, assassinations via coffee cup (Riddick would be
proud) and Boutella (famous for kicking deadly ass with ninja-sword legs as
'Gazelle' in Kingsman) is amazing as a physical actress -- a great scene with
her taking on a mob of LA gang underlings is nineties-action flick quality.
But what Artemis DOESN'T show speaks volumes, and is in
senses more bold than what it DOES. A massive showdown with Bautista wielding an
axe is merely implied, a bank vault goes uncracked (much to the chagrin of the
drilling specialist). Oft slammed by critics for 'missed opportunities' on the
contrary, I think fully revealing these would be easy, predictable Hollywood cliché,
and thinking about it in retrospect, wouldn't've added much. (The film was also
shot for $15 million, or about 1/3 the going rate for a major Marvel action
star, and given this A-List of Bautista, Foster, Brown, and Goldblum, there was
obviously some pro-bono work hours put in here.)
"Punk subculture originated out of working class
angst and the frustrations many youth were feeling about economic inequality
and the bourgeois hypocrisy. It was primarily concerned with concepts such as
pro-working class, egalitarianism, humanitarianism, etc." the inherently
infallible truth arbiter, Wikipedia, tells us.
Foster's character didn't have radioactive green Mohawks,
sleeveless jean jackets, or safety pins and studs everywhere, but her character
was the most actually punk in the 'substance' sense. Nurse actually did
humanitarian work, helped people who actually needed it, often at her own peril
-- such as Everest and an injured community liaison officer. The latter act could've
gotten her killed given the LA criminal godfather (played by Jeff Goldblum)
owns this future-tech hospital for the criminal elite.
She's also got the 'cyber' in cyberpunk covered with all
the 3D printed organs, laser-exactos, and even a broken bone-mending spray
based on biohacked coral polyps. (Director Pearce describes this in detail, and
experts on the movie ranged from NASA to SpaceX. The research on the movie is
one of its highest points.
While its neo-noir lighting and fixtures, whodunit
slow-burn sensibility and post-genre originality may not be everyone's idea of
a silver screen weekend getaway, for those who fans of true cyberpunk, and
tour-de-force from-the-heart indie filmmaking if you check into Hotel Artemis,
like the Eagles Hotel California says, 'you'll never leave'.
(Drew Pearce probably wanted to get that song in the movie but couldn't afford the rights, so imagine it playing over the credits!)
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