"I leave for five minutes and when I come back, everyone's a fucking alien! Now if I have to Men in Black your ass, you're gonna fucking take it!"
This is the first review I'm writing of a film I've already seen. I hadn't watched it in at least 5 years and my roommates suggested revisiting it for a laugh. I remembered enjoying the movie in high school and I was curious as to how it would hold up against my current, somewhat matured tastes. Hoo boy.
Quick plot synopsis for the uninitiated: The faculty of an Ohio high school is taken over by a race of aquatic, worm-like parasites who intend on spreading across the world, Invasion of the Body Snatchers-style. The only thing standing in their way is a rag-tag group of six misfit kids who must overcome their social and personal differences to thwart an extraterrestrial invasion. I'm sure it was pitched as The Breakfest Club meets The Thing.
To understand how preciously silly this movie is, you have to send your mind back though time to 1998. While Miramax was busy cranking out Oscar bait (to great success), it's genre branch Dimension Films, was also going full steam, releasing pretty much every mid-budget horror movie that came out in the late 90's. They made a seemingly concentrated effort to combine the then trendy revival of slasher films with the equally trendy resurgance of teen dramas and comedies. One of the major architects of both of these trends was Kevin Williamson, the writer of the Scream films, I Know What You Did Last Summer, Teaching Mrs. Tingle (remember that one? I didn't.) and the creator of Dawson's Creek. He's currently the showrunner for The Vampire Diaries on CW. One look at this mostly shitty oeuvre and you'd probably think you know exactly what to expect from The Faculty. And you'd almost be right.
The wild card in this equation is director Robert Rodriguez. The Faculty is a bit of a weird pause in Rodriguez's filmography. By 1998, he had already established himself as the king of over-the-top, south-of-the-border mayhem with the first two Desperado films and From Dusk 'Til Dawn. Afterwards, he would spend the first 5 years of the 21st century making movies for his kids (friggin' Spy Kids) before getting back into genre flicks with Sin City and Planet Terror. Stuck right in the middle is The Faculty. Watching it this time, I tried to keep an eye out for the usual hallmarks of a Rodriguez flick. Other than Salma Hayek showing up as the school nurse, all of Rodriguez's usual players sit this one out. Gone are most of his super-stylized camera moves, fairly subdued is the violence and gore. Taking all of this into consideration, the film feels like it suffered from some studio homogenization before release. Either that, or Rodriguez owed the Weinstein Bros. a favor and phoned this one in. The movie just lacks that ubiquitous, bat-shit sense of fun that most of his other films have. At the very least, it does seem that Rodriguez was aware of how shitty the script was. A sequence where the camera zooms in on an (obviously) evil teachers face via a serious of quickly cut, increasingly tight close ups seems pretty tongue-in-cheek on the part of the director.
The majority of the blame for this movie being pretty retarded can be leveled at Williamson. I was 11/12 in 1998, so I can't really say I was intimate with the lingo and sensibilities of high-schoolers at the time, but I can't imagine that Williamson was either. The film's dialogue is a laughably embarrassing jumble of goofy slang ('Guarenteed to jack you up.'), dated references (Men in Black and Independence Day are both referenced more than should ever be necessary) and flat-out cliches (The jock is soulful! The drug dealer is a closet academic! The popular girl is actually insecure! High schoolers have angst but are tougher than they seem!). Watching this makes me wonder how well Scream (a film I liked better than this one but have also not seen since high school) holds up after all these years. It also makes me glad I never watched Dawson's Creek. Williamson's misinterpretation/oversimplification of high school dynamics (he's not the only culprit; I remember watching American Pie, She's All That and many other similar films of the era and thinking that they in no way resembled any of the experiences I had on a day to day basis) seem especially stupid in retrospect given the recent wave of teen films (Superbad, Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist) that, despite occasionally outlandish plots, portray the interaction and mindset of high-schoolers with what I would consider laser-like accuracy. I, along with all of my friends, cursed like sailors in high school, and we weren't even fighting parasitic aliens. The swearing in this is almost perfunctory, as though the cast and crew would occassionally remember that they had an R rating and have someone say 'fuck' because they could. The entire high-school experience this film tries to convey rings overwhelmingly false.
Even disregarding its misportrayal of teenagers, the script has quite a few other glaring problems. It seems distinctly possible that Williamson handed in a few pages worth of character outlines that were then just taken and converted into dialogue. Characters say that they are complicated when discussing their complications. The drug dealer answers a question regarding his uncharacteristic knowledge of biology with, "I'm a contradiction." No shit, Sherlock. I'm surprised they didn't call the movie, 'A Movie Where The Teachers Are All Aliens'. The script also makes no effort to give the characters plausible reasons for doing things. Most of the assumptions they make regarding the aliens are based on nothing but information from the movies they're constantly referencing. The entire third act is structured around the idea of finding the queen alien and killing it in order to kill the lesser parasites and save the infected townspeople. This is done only because the characters have seen it in movies. It could be interpreted as being meta, but it just comes off as stupid. The most annoying scene for me personally is the 'Thing' scene (cribbed directly from one of my favorite scenes in one of my favorite movies of all time) in which the characters take turns taking hits of a drug that kills the aliens in order to prove that they are all human. Literally every single character has a stupid, inconsequential excuse for not taking it (Allergic! Straight-edged!) that they must be argued down from before they do it. It's just lazy suspense, pure and simple.
The real shame about this movie is that the cast is actually not bad. Leading our scrappy band of teen-agers are a 17 year old Elijah Wood (looking like he's about 12) as the artsy nerd and Josh Hartnett as the over-educated drug dealer. As far as I know, everyone loves Elijah Wood and he is pretty damn lovable in this, just because he's Elijah Wood. The person I was surprised by the most while rewatching this, however, was Josh Hartnett. When he first started showing up in movies, he seemed to fall into that lame Freddie Prinze Jr./Paul Walker archetype, but since then he's racked up a decent amount of weighty dramatic performances (Black Hawk Down and 30 Days of Night leap to mind). Despite his character in The Faculty having unbelievably douchey hair and being written as an insufferable, faux-deep know it all, I found myself ultimately giving him a pass on the whole. Not high praise I know, but it's something.
The actors playing the rest of the kids have mostly fallen into obscurity over the last decade. The only instance in which that seems undeserved is that of Clea DuVall, who played the disaffected, gothy outcast in this and many other films of this era (the Invisible Girl from Buffy being my favorite) and I always enjoyed her creaky, sarcastic voice and vulnerable sullenness. As for the teachers, they're played by a bizarrely eclectic cast of character actors (and Salma Hayek), stand-outs of which include Robert "T-1000" Patrick (giving every scene a possibly intentional comedic undertone by, to quote my roommate, "looking at every one like he wants to rape them") as the gym coach, and a hilariously young Jon Stewart as the science teacher. Also, keep an eye out for Shooter McGavin as Elijah Wood's dad. What happened to that guy?
I'm forced to conclude that, despite its derivative and stupid script, Robert Rodriguez was ultimately having fun with The Faculty. If you're going to watch it, I'd recommend ingesting your intoxicant(s) of choice beforehand and doing the same.
Don't forget to credit Jon Stewart's goatee! It was very affective.
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