Yes, it’s the Evil Texaco symbol!
One of the superior thrills for the movie viewer is going into a movie cold and discovering they’ve been transfixed for an hour without realizing it. I had that pleasure when I walked into a theater and watched the now-legendary The Usual Suspects (1995) without a clue as to what was happening. More recently, my Arts Editor and I had the same reaction to Magellan (2017), and even if I am not convinced it’ll ever be legendary, we enjoyed it and found it thought-provoking.
Into that same category falls Armstrong (2017), an action movie that has, as its primary theme, a meditation on the contrast between certainty and uncertainty. Rookie EMT Lauren, an ex-junkie, is deeply uncertain of herself and her future as she climbs into Ambulance 32 to ride the midnight streets of Los Angeles with Eddie. Before long, a huge explosion rends the quiet and, on dispatch to the scene, they literally run into a man who leaves one big dent in their ambulance’s hood. As they tend to him, his gibberish confuses them – and then they become even more confused when they find one arm is encased in a previously unknown prosthetic.
On the edge of shoving their patient, Armstrong, out the door, the two EMTs encounter a man in futuristic military costume, evidently searching for their patient, and mouthing apocalyptic Aztec religious references to the Fifth Sun. In the midst of the religious rhetoric, their patient surprises this attacker and kills him with a shocking blast of power.
Soon, we are told – with good reason to wonder – that a Doomsday Cult is at work, the sort that thinks Doomsday must be actively brought about, rather than passively awaited, and their patient is a dissident from the movement, burdened with his own ghosts from his military past.
Throughout the movie, Lauren’s personal uncertainty, the choice before her of working for good, or blotting everything out of her consciousness, is contrasted to those who are certain – principally, the representatives of the Cult, who are certain with the obduracy of granite that they are those who are Chosen to survive, and thus they have the right to escort everyone else to the Gates of Hell, if I may wax faux-eloquently. For Lauren, this means she must repeatedly ask herself what is right and what is wrong, while for those who are in the cult, the question has been answered so with such finality that the very concept of reopening the question, to look too closely into the depths of irrationality, is beyond conception. To die with the words of murderous orthodoxy on one’s lips is to have abandoned entirely the question of good and evil.
It’s a well done movie, but it’s not perfect. Some of the special effects are suggestive of a low-budget effort, but if it is low-budget, the moviemakers were smart enough to put their principal investment into the story and actors. I found myself more than willing to use my imagination to fill in the missing elements of the visuals in order to get on with the story.
And, without revealing its content, I would have not included the final scene. Lauren has been faced with a question, but this movie needn’t provide an answer. It’s enough for every viewer to put him or herself in Lauren’s place and meditate on how they might answer the question put to her. Her answer is both unnecessary and trite.
I won’t quite recommend it, but I can say we were pleasantly surprised. The violence isn’t too graphic, information is strategically withheld, and the questions asked are good questions. Dig it up one night if you’re in the mood for a highly focused thriller.
