Brand New World (1998) is the name given to the British film Woundings in its Region 1 release.
The story takes place in the not-too-distant future, with British forces
occupying an island they have just conquered. The occupation forces are still
mopping up, clearing land mines, and meeting occasional resistance. The
biggest problems are two-fold: (1) the soldiers are seriously unbalanced from
combat; (2) there are not enough single and willing local women, and those
available seem just as unbalanced as the soldiers. The government hits upon a
great solution. They recruit willing women from the mainland to move to the
war zone for romance, excitement and probably marriage with a soldier. Of
course this solution is not greeted with enthusiasm by the local women.
That is about all I could figure out from this film. The accents are thick;
it's difficult to understand much of the dialogue; and the film is just plain
strange. As an example, the commanding officer stutters badly, and keeps two
pet seals in his backyard, despite the fact that said backyard contains neither
water nor access to any.
Given the premise, Woundings could have been a very entertaining sex film,
but didn't have nearly enough sex and nudity for that. It also might have made insightful points
about occupation armies, but the characters were not developed enough to gain
any insight. Failing as entertainment, art and drama, this film did nothing
for me, and I find no evidence that anyone else took something worthwhile from
it, not can I imagine who the audience for this film would be.
You may think that Tuna's review is rather harsh.
You would be wrong. I tried to watch Woundings some months ago and couldn't get
through ten minutes. I finally applied a special cinematic sub-set of Scoopy's fourth rule, which
states: "Life's too short to dance with ugly women." We old farts
are acutely aware that we are allotted a very short time on this plane of
existence, and I was not willing to waste two hours of my precious remaining time with
this film.
It does not surprise me that the writer/director of this
film has not written or directed anything else.
Since I never got through the movie, the only thing I can add to Tuna's review is that the
cinematography is actually quite good, but even this silver lining has two clouds:
1) The DVD does not have a theatrical aspect ratio, so the
value of the photography is vitiated by the infernal TV-shaped box.
2) As my dad Suits used to say, shit painted white still
stinks.
