As a millenial, when I was a teenager and keenly trying to express my angst like a pufferfish expelling venom to everyone around me, I was drawn in to something dark (apart from the neon raccoon stripes in our hair): dear reader, I was a scene kid.
I mean, no, being a scene kid was not dark, it mostly consisted of listening to Fall Out Boy, wearing studded belts, and wondering how to extend the volume of your hair but up to twenty percent, at least for me. I look back with great fondness on my scene era – hell, I’m never going to be entirely out of it, as long as I have A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out on my workout playlist – and one of the centrepieces for my scene era was the movie Repo!: The Genetic Opera, directed by Darren Lynn Bousman.
In fact, it was one of the very first things I wrote about when I first started writing on the internet, and I thought it would make an interesting article to cast an eye back over the 2008 movie that helped prop up my scene kid days. Even though the musical doesn’t actually have music from scene bands or anything, the tone, styling, approach, and neon-goth energy perfectly captures that feel for me – I dressed up as leading woman Shiloh (Alexa Vega) at least three times for various comic-cons, and every single time, my dad wouldn’t notice I was actually wearing anything different than my daily outfits, they were so heavily inspired by her. I was obsessed, is what I’m saying.
But I also know that Repo! is a movie that has a certain bugbear of a place in people’s hearts. It’s not for everyone, and I get that. It was received with a pretty lukewarm handwave by critics at the time, most of them criticizing the style-over-substance that dominates the hyper-stylized movie. But the question, for me, was if my scene kid days could buoy me into still loving this movie as much as I did, or if I was going to find myself cringing over Paul Sorvino modulating his octaves to a gold box.
If there’s one thing that struck me watching Repo! again, it’s how damn ambitious this movie is. It’s a sung-through opera, with more than fifty numbers in less than a hundred minutes, set in a dystopian future where a huge company has created a plastic-surgery addicted population hooked on pain and painkillers in equal measure. Based on an idea Bousman came up with twelve years earlier, it’s a huge undertaking, no matter whether you think they pull it off or not.
And, look, I am going to say it: I think they do.
I understand that this movie is flawed. It is. With so many songs, not every single one is a banger, and there are a few that you sort of just have to sit through. The world sometimes looks a bit flimsy and cheap, the performances don’t always blow my socks off. It gets kind of convoluted towards the end, and there are some pacing and storytelling choices that I think could have been a little stronger. I don’t even disagree that it’s style over substance for the most part – the central theses don’t go particularly deep, but that’s not really the point. Also, and maybe this is just me, but I still find Seventeen an almost unbearably cringe parody of teenage rebellion.
Because if you’re going to do style over substance, make it stylish, you know? For me, the way that Repo! looks, feels, sounds, how it fills out it’s world, is so damn entertaining it papers over the cracks for people. Maybe it’s just the bright colours and white facepaint and Paris Hilton’s entire visage peeling off, but it plugs in to a warm, sticky part of my brain and lights it up for an hour and a half at a time. With a budget of just nine million, it’s a credit to the set and costume designers at how well they manage to bring together this vision of this particular version of the future. It feels cohesive and full, even when the sets do look like they might fall over if you lean on them for too long. The expository comic book idents are a great choice, consolidating the style and setting the scene in one fell swoop.
And the music – oh, the music. I know it’s not to everyone’s taste, but I really love it, to this day. For a film with so damn many songs in it, it’s a credit that so many of them are brilliant. Moving between more classic opera approaches to rock and roll to witty to dark to scary to sad – Yoshiki, who produced this soundtrack, deserves so much credit for how it juggles styles and approaches while nailing so many of them. And, for the record, the song that I have listened to most from this is a tie between We Started this Op’ra Shit and Infected, since I know you’ll ask (or since you know I’ll tell you anyway).
And, of course, so much of the credit for how great the music is comes down to how committed this cast are. To be upfront, there are a couple of ringers here for me – namely my beloved Bill Moseley, who is utterly repugnant here, crass and disgusting and just perfect for the role – but even outside of my personal biases, nobody feels like they’re phoning it in. Getting involved with a film this ambitious probably ruled out anyone who wasn’t really in love with the concept, and it shows – Anthony Stewart Head throws off the cuffs of Giles nicety as Nathan, tortured widower and part-time murderer, Sarah Brightman soars as Blind Mag (literally, at the end there), and Paris Hilton as the entitled, surgery-addicted heiress is still such a sly, fun bit of casting that Hilton leans into entirely. Everyone seems to be having fun here, and it brings this brightness to the screen even when some of the other elements might wobble slightly.
What I love about it most, though, is how it leans in to being an opera. And that means it’s sung-through, that means everyone is only communicating via song, that means that the third act is, actually, an opera. It’s over-the-top emotions, dark family drama, and performative absurdity feel operatic in the classic sense of the word, and it makes it easier to forgive some of the issues other people had with the movie (at least for me).
Maybe it’s the nostalgia speaking – I will say, watching this again made me want to crack out my stripy black and purple jeans and my Danger Days t-shirt – but I still think Repo! The Genetic Opera is a joy to watch. It’s absurd, bold, and I still don’t think there’s ever been anything else quite like it – whether that’s a good thing or not, I’ll leave up to you.
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By Lou MacGregor
(header image via Polygon)
No But Listen 