I feel I must admit right off the bat that the only reason I watched this was because I had heard Jon Stewart played a villain in it and was intrigued. I really had no idea what else to expect from the film, although I figured, heck, it’s a Robert Rodriguez movie, it ought to have plenty of action/horror with some dark tongue-in-cheek humor. A note to any who are interested, if you find yourself desperately trying to rationalize watching a movie by listing all the minutiae that could be good about it, but deep down you think it’ll be disappointing, it’s probably best to just let it go. Ultimately, the three minutes with Jon Stewart were delightful because I expected them to be, and the rest of the movie was cardboard. And not even cheese encrusted, bottom-of-the-pizza-box cardboard, just boring old dusty cardboard.
How best to describe the plot of “The Faculty?” Well, think “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” meets “Dawson’s Creek” with a lot more drug abuse. Or better yet, why not let the movie explain itself for you? The screenplay was written by Kevin Williamson, the same guy who wrote the aforementioned “Dawson’s Creek” as well as “Scream.” And “The Faculty” doesn’t mind taking a page or ten out of the “Scream” book of tricks, because it ends up being just as painfully self aware. Most of the film, we’re treated to the socially awkward, outcast Goth girl (portrayed as glaringly archetypal as only the nineties can) regaling the rest of the survivors of the rules they must abide now that their teachers and the student body have been taken over by mysterious alien parasites. In doing this, the characters make way too many assumptions about the nature of these aliens. It’s all very well and good to draw the parallel to Body Snatchers, but after that it’s just guesswork. The Goth, Stokely, played by Clea DuVall’s massive, overhanging forehead, guesses that if they kill the leader, or queen of the parasites, then all of them will die. Well wouldn’t that be fucking convenient? First of all, who’s to say there is a queen at all? Secondly, why assume that with her death, all the offspring would die too? They were all surviving fine on their own buried deep in the brains of the staff and sudents. When Ripley killed the queen in “Aliens” that didn’t automatically make all her babies die, this isn’t a Borg-like hive mind we’re talking about here.
The next big assumption comes right after my favorite scene in which the kids fight and kill the science teacher, Mr. Furlong, played by the infallible Jon Stewart. Up until this point, he had been trying to discover what the parasite was, and during his analysis of it, proved to know quite a lot for a high school biology teacher (When hypothesizing what the creature could be, he says, “A certain mesozoan only occurs in the kidney of certain octopuses or squids.” Really? Whatever you say, man). Anyways, after some time, he gets infected, and has a showdown with the students, who promptly stab a pen into his eye, killing him. Turns out the pen was filled with a homemade drug created by one of the survivors (Josh Hartnett plays the hyper-intelligent, lazy, drug-dealing layabout, and that’s terrible). That drug is a diuretic and thusly must have killed the water-loving parasite via dehydration. Good gravy! It’s the only explanation! Oh wait, no, here’s one, maybe he died because you SHOVED A FUCKING PEN IN HIS EYE! We later learn that these creatures can even survive after being decapitated, but these kids didn’t know that yet, therefore their conclusion was still a stupid one to jump to.
My main quarrel with this movie is too much of its plot is automatically resolved just by the students mentioning a farfetched solution, which happens to be the right answer. I can understand that trick working at the climax of an action movie, where the hero daringly escapes from imminent doom, but to have six annoying kids do it constantly throughout the movie and have it work every time just doesn’t seem fair.
Another thing that really bugged me was the scene in Josh Hartnett’s shed that directly rips off “The Thing.” In the scene, the kids all decide to take the diuretic to see which of them is infected, à la the blood testing scene from the aforementioned 80’s horror classic. What bothered me was the notion that the human’s had to do hard drugs in order to survive. I know most stories have their protagonist end up sacrificing something, whether that be subjecting themselves to physical harm, but the way this scene is portrayed just seems cheap, and it made me uncomfortable as such. Then again, this is coming from a guy who drinks less than a Mormon teetotaler, and the scene was shot by Robert Rodriguez, so I’m sure my reaction was exactly what he was going for.
Besides that scene, I notice a lot of the movie is devoted to the kids trying to determine who the queen is, while I was glaring at them going, “Really? Is it really that mysterious to you?” Honestly, this is one of those twists where, once it’s revealed, there’s so little tension released you might as well be sitting on a deflated whoopee cushion. You can tell who the queen is a good 45 minutes before it’s revealed, which is sad because the film does absolutely nothing to hint at who it is, and yet the fact that you can figure it out and the characters can’t makes them seem all the more stupid.
Overall, a big disappointment of a film, considering the star-studded cast. I mean where else can you find a movie where Jon Stewart gets stabbed in the face by Josh Hartnett, who then decapitates Famke Janssen in a car crash and… oh right, Selma Hayek plays the school nurse in it too. Oh, and Bebe Neuwirth is the principal, not to mention Elijah Wood being, like, the main protagonist and… holy fuck is that Usher?!
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