Director – Benjamin Brewer, Screenplay – Mike Nilon, Producers – Nicolas Cage, Arianne Fraser, Mike Nilon, Delphine Perrier, Braxton Pope & David M. Wulf, Photography – Frank Mobilio, Music – Kristin Gundred & Josh Martin, Visual Effects Supervisors – Ben Burrell & Zak Stoltz, Visual Effects – Pretend (Supervisor – Zak Stoltz) & Reactor VFX (Supervisor – Ben Burrell), Special Effects Supervisor – Brendan Byrne, Prosthetics – Odyssey (Mark Maher), Production Design – Shane McEnroe. Production Company – Saturn Films.
Cast
Nicolas Cage (Paul), Jaeden Martell (Joseph), Maxwell Jenkins (Thomas), Sadie Soverall (Charlotte Rose), Joe Dixon (Mr Rose), Samantha Coughlan (Mrs Rose), Joe Gillman (Hobson)
Plot
It is fifteen years after the collapse of society. Paul lives in a farmhouse in the countryside with his two sons Joseph and Thomas. At night they must barricade themselves inside the house as creatures outside that try to batter their way in. The studious Joseph has rebuilt a makeshift vehicle and makes plans to trap one of the creatures. The more carefree Thomas has developed a relationship with Charlotte at the neighbouring Rose farmhouse. Thomas is late getting back before nightfall and trips and falls into a gulley. Paul insists on going out to find him and the two are trapped in a cave overnight where Paul ends up badly injured in fighting off the creatures. The boys go to get help for their father from the Rose farm but are turned away. Their need to get help ends up threatening both households.
As Arcadian opens with Cage and sons barricading themselves in the farmhouse from the at-that-point unseen characters outside, I was getting a strong vibe of I Am Legend (1954) – that is the original Richard Matheson novel, not any of the botched film versions The Omega Man (1971) or I Am Legend (2007). As the film goes on and we get a glimpse of more of the creatures, what the film seems to hold more allegiance to is more the recent hit of A Quiet Place (2018).
Arcadian emerges okay. It held my interest throughout. Director Benjamin Brewer holds off showing us the creatures until about halfway through. There is the outlandish scene where Jaeden Martell is asleep in a chair in the house and a hand comes in through the slot in the door and extends a nail that reaches halfway across the room to where Jaeden is. The film becomes undeniably entertaining when the creatures are let out of the bag in the latter third of the show where they prove some of the weirdest monsters ever designed for a film.
(l to r) Nicolas Cage with sons Maxwell Jenkins and Jaeden Martell in a world following civilised collapse
On the other hand, Arcadian never quite creates the seat-edge tension that A Quiet Place did. Surprisingly for a film that headlines Nicolas Cage and is produced through his production company (Saturn Films) and he listed as a producer, he ends up being off-screen for almost half the film, sidelined as being deathly ill, where the main characters end up becoming the two boys.
The other thing is that the film is very vague about what the creatures are or what has caused society to collapse. About all that we ever get are the scene where Maxwell Jenkins and Sadie Soverall are playing a game of coming up with stories about what happened, although it is not clear if they are just making things up or recounting what they know. I kept wanting to know more about the world we were in.
It is also not clear what the term Arcadian means in the film’s context. Arcadia was an area in Ancient Greece and has come to stand in for meaning a modern paradise. There is the common Latin phrase ‘Et in Arcadia Ego (which translates as “And in Arcadia I am”), which is usually used in terms of a eulogy as in “I live on in Paradise.” The use of the term is popular – there are over thirty towns with the name Arcadia in the USA and more than a dozen other places around the world. The name Arcadia/Arcadian is used for everything from businesses, ships, a Duran Duran spinoff band, the name of an episode of The X Files (1993-2002, 2016-8) to a species in the Star Trek universe. It is never clear what the intended meaning of ‘Arcadian’ is here but you get the sense that it is meant to refer to the pastoral countryside where the characters live as a form of paradise.
Arcadian was the third film from Benjamin Brewer who had previously put Nicolas Cage through his paces in the crime film The Trust (2016). The film is written and produced by Mike Nilon, a former talent agent who has produced a bunch of Nicolas Cage films since 2014 – this is his tenth with Cage.
