THE FIRST PURGE MOVIE
The movie really takes off only when NFFA leaders, disappointed that blacks in the “community” are not killing enough of each other, send in the white racists to stir things up. Nya leaves the church where she was hiding to rescue him. He finds he is unable to kill him, runs away, gets in trouble, and calls Nya. It’s hard to care about the characters, who seem incidental.ĭmitri’s plan is to hunker down with his gang, but Isaiah goes out and confronts Skeletor. The older Purge was a horror film with a gimmicky premise, but The First Purge has a message. For the first half of the movie, there’s little violence, no suspense, and not much forward momentum. The plot is now telegraphed: Isaiah will join the purge, find he’s not up to it, will be rescued by Nya, and then both will need to be rescued by Dmitri, who will atone for his criminal past through heroism. While Nya is protesting NFFA policy, shouting “do not participate !” he is slashed by a deranged man known as “Skeletor.” Dmitri promises to keep Nya and her brother safe during the night of mayhem, but Isaiah is eager to get revenge, and decides to take advantage of the purge instead of lying low or leaving the neighborhood. These wise characters want to thwart the “purge” by keeping the peace in the “community.” However, the naive brother Isaiah is secretly working as a dealer for Dmitri’s organization, unknown to both his sister Nya and Dmitri. The leading actors are virtually unknown and it shows - they try to sound erudite and “ghetto” at the same time, and can’t quite pull it off. Dmitri upholds certain standards, such as trying to keep Isaiah out of the criminal life, and thus the audience is encouraged not to think he is responsible for more deaths in the “community” than the purge itself. And of course, there’s Dmitri, Nya’s ex-boyfriend, the drug dealer/crime boss who considers himself a leader of the neighborhood he’s destroying. There’s Isaiah, her brother, the naive and soft youth seduced by the temptations of revenge and the criminal life. There’s Nya, who is the street-smart yet woke activist black woman who wants to organize the “community.” She lives in a leaky apartment, so we know she is oppressed by The Man. The non-whites are a collection of stock characters. Indeed, there is not one positive white character in the entire film. Almost all the members of the NFFA we see are white, while all of the main characters are non-white. Thus, from the beginning, we know that the NFFA represents conservatives. The NFFA’s conquest of both Republicans and Democrats is left unexplained except for the revelation that it was supported by the NRA. The film’s premise is that a new political party, the New Founding Fathers of America (NFFA), has taken over the country. This is the fourth film in this series, and now there are no shades of grey: As with stand-up comedy in the age of Trump, it’s naked propaganda with the message that white people are bad and non-white people are good - the cinematic equivalent of a bumper sticker. There’s no such pretense in The First Purge, a 2018 prequel about the first such social “experiment,” which the government conducts in the hope that the rabble will exterminate each other and work the worst out of their systems.
One could vaguely sense themes of race and class, but there was also an attempt to create suspense and drama over the characters’ fates. The “purge,” a one-night period during which no crime will be punished, was the backdrop to a home-invasion movie in which a white family, helped by a shabby-looking black man with a heart of gold, fights off murderous villains dressed like WASP stereotypes.
In the original 2013 movie, The Purge, anti-white themes were camouflaged.
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