The Cabin in the Woods Review, or If Joss Whedon Were Born On the Other Side of the Atlantic...
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I wasn't a Joss Whedon fan. Everything I know about Joss Whedon, I learned from The Avengers. Before that, everything I knew about Joss Whedon, I learned from my co-writer Claire and Tumblr. And before that, I knew nothing about Joss Whedon.
Yes, I was aware that there was a show called Buffy the Vampire Slayer. But after the film Cruel Intentions, I thought Sarah Michelle Gellar was too slutty for my taste. Also, I thought Buffy was a show for girls, like Charmed, so I never checked it out anymore.
Anyway, after watching The Avengers, I decided that Joss Whedon is a huge geek and one brilliant storyteller, and is definitely worth my time. So I decided to watch The Cabin in the Woods. And although it had the feel of a B-movie, I wasn't disappointed.
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| Except by the dirt on the characters's faces. |
The film started out like an ordinary college movie, where you get the typical archetypes: the hunk (a pre-Thor Chris Hemsworth), the slut (Anna Hutchison), the virgin (Kristen Connolly), and the pothead (Fran Kranz). Then as the film became weirder and weirder, I said to myself, "Hold on! This looks strangely familiar..."
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"When you say 'familiar', you don't mean us, right? Because we're basically Whedon staples." |
And then it hit me. Doctor Who.
For those of you unfamiliar with Doctor Who, you need to explore things from other English-speaking countries, not just the USA. Why not explore stuff from the birthplace of English itself? If everything you know about the British Isles you learned from Harry Potter and the Beatles, then shame on you.
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| "How about the Spice Girls?" |
All throughout the film, I kept thinking how much Joss Whedon's style is so much similar to the styles of Doctor Who head writers Steven Moffat and Russell T. Davies, the latter being the driving force that brought the Doctor back in 2005 after a television hiatus of more than a decade. I even went so far as tweeting that if Joss Whedon were only born under the Union Jack, he would surely be the head writer for DW.
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| Same level of creepiness. Satisfied? |
And I thank Claire for coming to the rescue, when she said that Russell T. Davies was actually inspired by the works of Joss Whedon. And that's not just fangirl ramblings (Claire is both a Whedon-whore as well as a Whovian).
“[Buffy the Vampire Slayer] showed the whole world, and an entire sprawling industry, that writing monsters and demons and end-of-the world isn’t hack-work, it can challenge the best. Joss Whedon raised the bar for every writer—not just genre/niche writers, but every single one of us.”─Russell T. Davies
It is, actually, quite obvious, or else I wouldn't have noticed it. It's the perfect balance between single character conflicts, group dynamics, aliens, monsters, the mythological, and the supernatural. And another thing: is Joss Whedon a pothead? Because in this film, the only survivors are the pothead and the virgin. Brilliant, right?
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| "That's 'cause his name is really Joss Weed-don. Get it?" |
Like I said earlier, I wasn't a fan of Joss Whedon. But I am now.
The Cabin in the Woods. USA. 2012.
Rating: Seven point eight out of ten.
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