Lamar Reviews - "Arcadian" (Airdate 4/26/2024)

It was not a hard decision picking what movie to go see. You always go with Nicolas Cage, no matter what. Even if the movie sucks, you can bet Nick Cage gave it everything he had. He worked harder than anybody else to entertain the audience. If the writer wrote a crappy movie, it’s on him, never on Nick Cage. I have seen some pretty crappy Nicolas Cage movies, Wickerman immediately comes to mind, and a ton of great ones, Con Air, Face Off, Moon Struck, and one of my favorites, Raising Arizona, to name a few, but I have NEVER seen Nicolas Cage be bad at playing the part that was given to him.

It is no different in Arcadian. The movie opens up as the apocalypse is in full swing. Nicolas Cage’s character Paul is doing his best to escape it. He finds two abandoned infant boys and takes them with him. Paul is now a dad and the boys are the purpose of his life. We join them again 15 years later. They live in a farmhouse as a family.

The boys, Joseph and Thomas, played by Jaeden Martell and Maxwell Jenkins, bicker back and forth as brothers do. Paul as a father teaches them everything they need to know to survive. That includes locking down the house at dark to keep out whatever is scratching and trying to get in during the night.

The boys have chores, Joseph is the studious and responsible one who follows the rules, while Thomas is a free spirit, more interested in helping at the farm over the hill, that just so happens to have a girl his age, Charlotte, played by Sadie Soverall. We are introduced to the monsters of this apocalypse very slowly, a little at a time. But when you finally see em, you can’t stop looking at them through half closed eyes! They are very unique.

Everything is going well for everyone involved, until it’s not. The last third of the movie is a wild rollercoaster ride that does not disappoint.

The movie is 1 hour and 32 minutes, Rated-R for bloody images and violence.

Playing the end-of-the-world hero dad is certainly no challenge to him, but in Nick Cage fashion, to prepare for the movie he isolated himself with his family for three months. And he not only nailed it, he actually did so while taking a step back to allow the boys to really be the focus of the movie.

What started off as a family surviving the apocalypse, turns into a coming-of-age movie about the boys, and ends up as a wild action/horror movie with very inventive monsters.

What really helps make this movie so intense is we as the audience do not have an overview of anything. We only know what they know when they know it. We only get to see the monsters in glimpses until we finally see them in full detail, and they are both amazing and completely terrifying.

This movie by no means is on the level of A Quiet Place, but it has that feel. And it does have another thing going for it. Nicolas Cage.

My Score: 5 Budweisers

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