If Fast Color had come to a theater near me, I would have paid to see it: black women, superpowers, dystopian future, yes, please and thank you! Sadly I never had an opportunity and had to wait until it was available for home viewing then I watched it immediately and was disappointed. Before you derisively dismiss my disappointment because I enjoy comic book movies, get to know me. I regularly watch independent films, foreign films and documentaries. I do not need special effects to enjoy a good story, and the best films commence with a solid story.
Fast Color’s backstory kept me interested and surprised with its gradual revelations instead of belabored prose dumps thinly disguised as dialogue, but at the end of the movie, I wondered if the movie would have been better without the little CGI that we got, and if it was simply a story about three generations of women torn apart by more quotidian drama and circumstance than conspiracies. The world could still be in the midst of environmental collapse since oops, it is actually happening, but it does not feel as if the filmmakers fully committed to the powers, were slightly ashamed of it and/or fully considered the heart of their metaphor.
Fast Color felt oddly quiet about race while clearly making a twist that I normally have seen coming that tried to implicitly parallel the possession of powers as something forbidden with racism. Without that twist, it would not have bothered me that race was not the focal point of the story. The implication is oddly timid about this point and was another reason why powers felt extraneous to a story full of elements that would tell the same story in a more effective way. The regional aspect of the story is rich with potential, but also feels more like a setting than a separate character, which a really evocative location can be. It had the potential to be the geographic soul sister of Young Ones, which had a strong beginning, but was ultimately inconsistent.
Fast Color’s visual narrative initially had a timing problem. There were points when I thought that a scene was a flashback, but it was not. The filmmakers needed to do more work to differentiate time periods so a viewer could instantly recognize when it was. The CGI for the powers is not revealed until the end, and it felt oddly anti-climactic though I understood the intention behind the moment and would have forgiven it if the story was better, and it was not slightly spoiled with the cover art. I kept waiting for it then when it came, I realized that I already saw it.
Fast Color’s uses women wielding power in a gender normative way as inherently positive, life giving and as a metaphor for motherhood. To be fair, being a mother is a superpower and life giving, but it is also one in which countless women are told from an early age is their greatest calling and accomplishment, which if it is, good for you, but if it is not, you will be like me and roll your eyes at the bait and switch that the overall goal of the family is to reclaim not only your history and your family, but your greatest power as a mother, literally and in a mother nature sense. Eye roll. Maybe I felt let down by this film because I associate powers with something countercultural and unimaginable whereas being a mother is inherently imaginable as a woman. It is something that your body desperately works hard every month to encourage you to have one whether or not you will be good at it. After I saw the film, the filmmakers admitted that having their first child was their inspiration for this film, which is lovely, but I have zero interest in watching.
I hate oversimplifications, especially when rooted in gender, which is probably why I am drawn to films with realistic mothers or monstrous mothers. Being a mother or a woman is not always ultimately a positive and being masculine or men wielding power is not always inherently destructive. Power, masculine or feminine, can appear as a spectrum of possibilities between positive and negative. Fast Color did a great job of showing that facing trauma will make power creative as opposed to a threat, which is a gender neutral approach that I can empathize with, but it is also so intertwined and inseparable from a willingness to be a good mother and daughter that comes pretty rapidly after what was supposed to be a long estrangement that it cheapens the denouement.
I actually hate when movies like Fast Color allude to something really cool, a promised land, throughout the denouement then treat us like Moses and leave us stuck on the mountaintop, the best point of the movie, never seeing it, but expecting us to believe that everything will suddenly be hunky dory. It reminded me of Casey Affleck’s dystopian film, Light of My Life. When did I destroy your ten commandments? What were they? You and I both know you may never give me a sequel, and just when things are getting interesting, you pull the rug out from under me. How dare you!?! It was a little more excusable in Affleck’s film because it is more hope than certainty, but in this film, it feels as if it is the beginning of another chapter. Fortunately it sounds like Viola Davis may be developing this movie into a television series, which I would consider watching in spite of my issues with this film.
If Fast Color can retain the same cast, I am in. I always enjoy Gugu Mbatha-Raw’s performances in Belle, Beyond the Lights, Concussion, Miss Sloane, A Wrinkle in Time and Odd Thomas. It was nice to see her take center stage as the protagonist again and long overdue. Lorraine Toussaint is a treasure and is honestly the best part of the film—bear in mind the prior sentence. She just exudes a serene power, and I would have happily watched this film if she was the protagonist. She gets the best line, “I’m not afraid that I can’t stop these men. I’m afraifd that I can.” I have always enjoyed David Strathairn’s energy, and he delivers his solid style of acting and immediately gaining a viewer’s trust while doing very little. I loved Saniyya Sidney’s performance in The Passage, but could take or leave her performance in this film, which if the television series was filmed later, is great news because then she is developing her craft well. The films little vignettes leading to her journey home were filled with potential, especially the bar interaction. It should be a forgettable moment, but it was not, which shows that the film certainly has something special in the actual story and performances to nail the human moments.
I would not be opposed to rewatching Fast Color since I saw it on a weeknight and maybe was not patient enough to appreciate the deliberate pacing, aka it was slow, but I think that my first impression was correct. I probably had a thumb on the scale because of the cast and premise, but the actual execution left me unsatisfied. I would still watch a series.