You
have to improvise during a dodgy commando mission. Inflexible adherence to the
letter rather than the spirit of the objective is definitely bad leadership.
Unfortunately, a Queeg-like team-leader insists on following their orders to
the letter, even if it results in a war crime. The entire squad will pay dearly—perhaps
for all eternity in Tom Paton’s Black Ops (a.k.a. Stairs, a.k.a. The
Ascent), which releases tomorrow on VOD.
The
orders were simple: collect intel and kill everyone in the guerilla camp.
Nobody knew they were holding a civilian prisoner, but Stanton forced (at
gunpoint) the reluctant Kia Clarke to shoot her too. Turns out she had a bit of
the shine or whatever, because her dying curse turns out to be quite potent.
When
the team arrives for their de-brief, a malfunctioning elevator forces them to
climb the stairs and climb and climb. Eventually, they figure out there are in
some kind of supernatural Hell or Purgatory. If they do not keep climbing sufficient
floors within an allotted time, they will die a grisly Scanners-ish
death. When they exit the stairwell, they mysteriously find themselves back at
the paramilitary camp, right before their earlier selves launched the fateful
strike. Clarke quickly decides they must somehow stop themselves from killing
the weird prisoner to break the Sisyphean punishment, but the knuckle-dragging
Stanton refuses to cooperate, despite the karma trap he led them into.
The
infinite staircase is a rather surreal, but the film really shines when the
unit starts trying to change history. The way Paton layers each time loop over
the ones that came before is surprisingly clever. Paton quite nimbly directs
the time traffic and blends each successive foray into the recent past, earning
comparison to Nacho Vigalondo’s TimeCrimes and Hugh Sullivan’s Infinite Man (which is high praise).
Paton
and cinematographer George Burt also give the film a grungy, gritty texture
very much as they did for Black Site. The two films do not constitute a
duology, but they share stylistic and thematic common ground. They also both
co-star Samantha Schnitzler and Bentley Kalu, who are terrific (again), as
Clarke and Ben Garrett, two particularly resilient commandos.
In
terms of category, Black Ops falls closer towards the horror end of the
spectrum (at least when it is in the stairwell), but Paton and his ensemble
still crisply and convincingly execute a number of action scenes. There really
is a lot of cool stuff here for genre fans. Highly recommended for fans of
genre-straddling in the Twilight Zone tradition (in its darker
manifestations) and scruffy sf-tinged horror (like Joe Begos’ The Mind’s Eye),
Black Ops releases tomorrow (6/12) on VOD platforms.
