The modern disillusionment with the compromises wrought by big studios in the entertainment industry has brought on a Renaissance of sorts for indie games and movies. Social media networks make it easier than it has ever been for smaller productions to reach out and gain the kind of viewership that was previously possible only with the help of big-name studios and their deep pockets. As more and more of these small budget/big idea productions come out each year though, it is becoming increasingly obvious that for every Reservoir Dogs there are a dozen or so movies that just should never have been made and for each The Stanley Parable or Antichamber there are countless indie games made by people that shouldn’t even be allowed near a computer. Robyn Miller (pictured above as The Immortal Augustus Gladstone’s eponymous character) is known primarily for creating the immensely popular Myst and Riven PC games with his brother back in the mid-90s and essentially nothing else until the aforementioned indie mockumentary movie. Does The Immortal Augustus Gladstone (TIAG) live up to Robyn Miller’s reputation for groundbreaking story telling or does it suffer from the feeble blandness characteristic of all too many poorly executed indie ventures? Read on to find out just how immortal I found this movie to be.
TIAG was preceded in 2011 by a viral campaign of sorts that is alluded to several times in both the movie and its accompanying PR materials. This campaign consisted of a YouTube account for the Augustus Gladstone character wherein he told stories from his 150+ year life and gave tours of his “home” which was later to be featured in the movie. This virtually unknown YouTube channel gained a very modest following of just over 200 followers, but regardless serves as the pretense for the mockumentary. Apparently the filmmakers (almost all of whom play themselves using their real names) found out about Augustus through his YouTube channel and decided to do a documentary about this unusual man who claims to be immortal and how he lives his life in a corner of a condemned hotel in Portland.
The Augustus character himself is fairly interesting at face value: a (supposedly) 156 year old southern gentleman of amiable temperament who must wear a wig and draw on his eyebrows to maintain a somewhat normal appearance. Miller plays this character fairly well with an eccentric charm and (for the most part at least) an unhurried gait one would associate with someone of advanced age. The film’s other characters are not really shown enough to be of great note, but were all competently and genuinely portrayed.
TIAG excels in a place that one wouldn’t necessarily expect an indie release to as well, in its score. As I watched the movie I was often struck by how well the music fitted the scenes and imbued them with some much-needed life (and not only because of Augustus’ purported vampirism). It turns out Mr. Miller not only created and starred in this production, but composed the impressive score too. This film must have been quite a gargantuan undertaking for him which makes it even more of a shame that it ends up not being very good.
Once the novelty of the initially quite compelling character of Augustus and the movie’s impressive soundtrack wears off the unfortunate audience is left with another 80 minutes or so of well-scored tedium. What makes it worse is that this tediousness is accentuated rather than alleviated by the movie’s competent components. As far as mockumentaries go, TIAG is well put together with talking head segments and even word from the street interviews with people around the city on the movie’s salient themes. It’s shot as competently as any mockumentary I’ve seen, the acting is fine and the music is at times inspired, but all of these things can’t manage to counteract the film’s tedium making it even more frustrating for the viewer because the crew has shown that they had the skills necessary to make something truly compelling.
TIAG’s ultimate stumbling blocks are its plot and its approach to the central topic of vampirism (thereby its characterization of the main character). These in turn could be blamed perhaps on Miller’s… unique view of the nature of the monsters in classic, truly great monster narratives. The Director’s Statement included in the press materials for the movie states:
At its base The Immortal Augustus Gladstone is a monster movie. The character of Augustus unexpectedly has a lot in common with monsters like Frankenstein or King Kong who I see as almost childlike beings, trying to make sense of their own brutality, and struggling to survive. I wanted to mirror those traditional monsters while setting the story against the backdrop of the digital age, including the often unforgiving mayhem of a documentary film.
? Robyn Miller
Frankenstein’s monster and King Kong are surely some of the most “childlike” of the world’s classic monsters, Frankenstein’s monster because of its sudden awakening from the icy grasp of death (not to mention being composed of a mottled bunch of random body parts) and King Kong because it was kidnapped from its natural environment and forced into a strange new world in captivity. Surely none of these concepts apply to Bram Stoker’s Dracula, a proud centuries-old nobleman, or any vampire in any reasonably competent production. While a movie looking at vampirism from the perspective of a childlike character would be interesting (Let the Right One In), and not all vampires can be expected to be of noble lineage, the concept of an almost centuries old sentient being being so vulnerable to the vicissitudes of life is frankly absurd regardless of how much you accept the world presented in the film. No matter how fictional the character, you’d think that someone who had lived roughly two average human lifetimes would have been around the block and seen enough of the world to know that “this too shall pass”.
So, the audience is left with this living juxtaposition of a character, an aged vampire with little to no experience or wisdom that one would attain through their supposed long life. The movie tries to play with the notion that no one involved really believes that he is a genuine vampire, being enlightened modern folk like you or I, but on the whole the audience will certainly receive the very overt impression that they’re meant to believe that the character in the context of the movie was indeed telling the truth about his “monstrous” nature.
Augustus’ purpose for creating the obscure YouTube channel that was meant to have spawned this mockumentary is stated as “setting the record straight on vampires”. Through interviews with Augustus we’re told that “real” vampires don’t have pointy canine teeth nor are they repelled by crosses, but they do need to drink blood, or at least the plasma — that’s the important part. Through his actions we see that they’re not terribly photosensitive either — he constantly walks around in daylight and one can imagine him tipping his hat at Edward Cullen as they merrily pass each other on a sunny afternoon. The thing that makes this portrayal of vampires staggeringly feeble is not only that it goes against centuries of well established and otherwise often expertly expanded lore, but that these details are just mentioned in passing when they could have formed the basis of an intriguing narrative.
Every time that the movie seems to be going in an interesting direction aside from watching people talk to a mildly odd but wholly unremarkable vampire in his little granny home it without fail falls flat on its face before anything interesting or entertaining can be gleaned from the scenario. A prime example of this is when Augustus agrees to go see a medical doctor to see what they think about his vampirism. This in itself is an excellent scenario, so much could be learned about what makes Augustus’ unique brand of vampire tick — when they go to draw blood would any even come out? Does he have a heartbeat? Is he warm or stone cold? Do his pupils dilate in bright light? How does he metabolize the blood that he consumes, and how does it keep him living forever if he has an otherwise human digestive system? Of course this opportunity for plot advancement, if there were anything to advance, is almost mockingly wasted as he refuses any needles and gets upset during an EEG causing them to leave. The plot continually suffers from this unwillingness to pursue anything that could possibly be mildly entertaining about the character or his situation right up until its final anticlimactic and uncharacteristic denouement that peters out to leave you wanting your hour and a half back. To add insult to injury, Miller even makes Augustus’ prize possession a well-worn copy of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Perhaps if he had bothered to read it himself we would have had the pleasure of seeing a less pointlessly fallacious depiction of a vampire.
Had he set out to entertain or provoke thought Miller could have had an excellent time bringing the audience on an examination of how a single unremarkable vampire would have to live in modern times or he could have focused much more on how he proposed vampires mechanically operated regarding their exotic behaviours in this piece when compared to modern understandings of vampire lore. I think that Robyn Miller, having handled the lion’s share of the movie’s writing, scoring, acting, and editing (to varying degrees of success), reveals a lot more about himself through TIAG than he was intending. You could say that he himself is an immortal character, forever in the history books for his video game creations, wanting to set the record straight and show that he is still relevant and that his life’s greatest work isn’t depressingly far behind him.
It’s very plain to see that this is not the work to once again propel Mr. Miller to the forefront of popular culture. Having done almost everything possible he could for this movie he has proven only that he should be looking for other avenues to regain past glories — particularly in the field of music as his scoring of TIAG is easily the greatest part of the work. Even though he’s said some harsh things about video games in the past, I’m sure the gaming community would still welcome him back if he returned to it as a prodigal son. If you’re at all interested in this movie because of Miller’s involvement perhaps just check out its very reasonably priced soundtrack, if you’re looking for vampire stories do yourself a favour and check out a book you can really sink your teeth into like the original Dracula, Del Toro’s The Strain or Lukyanenko’s Night Watch series instead — don’t say I didn’t warn you.
5.1 / 10
Missable