Event

NUKIE

dir. Sias Odenaal, Michael Pakleppa
South Africa. 92 mins.

Described by Nelson Mandela as one of his very favorite films at the end of a three-plus decade prison sentence, Michael Pakleppa and Sias Odendaals NUKIE is a worthy contender for least-necessary motion picture experience of all time. Every DINOSAUR ISLAND has its JURASSIC PARK; there is simply no way to introduce NUKIE without invoking E.T. THE EXTRATERRESTRIAL early and often, as the film is at once a maudlin ripoff and expanded-universe spinoff of a type - if E.T. had relatives across the same galaxy with Boer accents, and/or Melissa Mathesons original screenplay kicked off with ten minutes of E.T. and Elliot screaming each others first names, AKIRA-style. (Its approaches to 90s computer imaging technology and throbbing postcolonial tribal fantasia also harken back to Wim Wenders' UNTIL THE END OF THE WORLD.)

Last year, the cinema journal of note Film Fun put it like this: THE REVENANT is looking for America, but cant find it. The same is true for Nukie the character, whose twin brother Miko is held hostage in a NASA black site somewhere in Florida. While the fiberglass-and-rubber duo remain connected by space telepathy, Nukie touches down in the South African savanna in search of a Hollywood ending; his quest is jarring to the rational senses, like a hellish placeholder miniaturized metaphor for what NUKIE the movie wants to accomplish but never will. Eventually our disgusting hero befriends a pair of tribal kids (Siphiwe and Sipho Mlangeni) who, along with a missionary (Glynis Johns) and a slap-happy scientist (Steve Railsbeck), help bring Nukie around to bust Miko out of the laboratory. Like its twin taglines - "A magical space adventure" and "An adventure out of this world" - NUKIE is at once generic and unsettling as all get-out, a unique post-apartheid car crash of a movie that's spent the last quarter-century with its head in the sand.