One of the oldest myths of mankind is that during a time of penultimate crisis, ancient heroes will return to the land in order to rescue society from its own blind and self-destructive foolishness. For the first 15 or 20 minutes of The Angry Birds Movie, I felt bored, frustrated and alienated – and then I got it, and had to bow before a spectacularly confident stroke of movie-making genius.What is the Truth About Angry Birds: The Movie? Freedomain Radio is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by signing up for a monthly subscription or making a one time donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
I am not only a bald eagle, but also the host of the largest and most popular philosophy show in the world, Freedomain Radio, which you can find at freedomainradio.com.
So, for the first 15 or 20 minutes or so of the new movie Angry Birds, I felt bored, frustrated, and alienated.
And then, I got it, and had to bow before a spectacularly confident stroke of movie-making genius.
First off, there's going to be a spoiler or two.
Now, the opening scene of the movie is a montage of hyperkinetic cutscenes as Red, a flightless bird with eyebrows like Mississippi ditch caterpillars, catches and carries and drops a precious egg through a jungle on his way to deliver it to a birthday party.
He arrives just in time, only to be fun-blocked by a pompous and persnickety father bird who shames and berates him for being just terrible.
A few seconds late, Red eventually loses his cool, attacks his client, and then is dragged to court and verbally humiliated by an ancient asexual judge.
As punishment, he is sentenced to mandatory anger management counseling.
Now, there are three other birds sentenced to the same deepity pastel merry hell, a hyperkinetic troublemaker named Chuck, a slow-fused gentle explosive soul named Bomb, and a giant rumbling pincushion of a bird named Terrence, incomprehensibly voiced by Sean Penn, who sounds like he keeps falling asleep on the toilet and dreaming of biryani.
The generally delightful Maya Rudolph provides the voice of Matilda, the fixed-smile fascist, in charge of rehabilitating these wayward specimens of testosterone.
Her smiley, bubbly totalitarianism, so reminiscent of all those creepy conform and we might release you, psychiatrists, It's like being locked in the trunk of your crazy ex's car while she jabbers up front, suddenly demanding to know if you're enjoying the ride.
Well, are you?
There is so much in the first part of the movie that is annoying, inconsequential, claustrophobic, irrelevant.
It's like being plagued by restless leg syndrome during a radical feminist indoctrination seminar.
These are empty birds without perspective, knowledge, wisdom, or purpose.
It is a highly feminized, almost...
Gynocentric world, where masculinity is a rather smelly and inconvenient intrusion into the Muzak-drenched mall of empty rainbow materialism.
No one can be offended, which means that no one can ever really exist.
We all have secret thoughts that would shock others.
Free speech staves off loneliness by reminding us that we are not isolated by our individuality.
Political correctness is an isolating cult of self-condemnation for pretty much what we all think anyway.
Now, Red is existentially discontented in this falsely contented world.
He knows something is wrong.
Something is missing, which is why he keeps colliding into the share, be nice mantra of his dying society.
And it is dying, just as a hive opened by a bear just before being eaten.
As Aristotle said, tolerance is the last virtue of a dying society.
And in this plastic, empty world of flightless birds, everything is tolerated.
Except masculinity, skepticism, discontent, ambition, and clear, unfettered honesty.
The very virtues that built a peaceful society in the first place.
Red also has...
Low sexual market value.
As a child he is mocked for making an aspirational statue of a soaring eagle while the other chicks pour over empty idiot art of rainbows and sunshine.
As an adult, Red is friendless, loveless, occasionally glancing with bitter enmity at the lovebirds' cooing dopamine nonsense into each other's feathery earholes.
His necessary genes are in real danger of dying out one more generation, and there would be no more like him, and all would be lost.
All this begins to change when the pigs show up.
Now, The first thing to understand about Angry Birds the movie is that it is not a Hollywood production.
The Finnish filmmakers could not get the funding they wanted from Tinseltown and so had to find cash from outside the system.
This means that they did not have to regurgitate like mother birds into a lunch bag all the mind-numbingly repetitive cliches of generic Hollywood brain-trash children's pretend-ertainment.
This means that not all girls are smart and wise, not all boys are loud and smelly and dumb, not all strangers turn out to be friends, not all evildoers come with horns and red glowing eyes, and not all outsiders win by eventually conforming to the tribe.
When the pig ship arrives, it knocks over Red's house.
His house is on the edge of the water, at the border.
Got it?
Initially, only two pigs emerge, with great fanfare and entertainment and, hey, we promise they're not meant to represent migrants, green Irish skin and tinderific outback do-si-do dance moves.
Red and his friends explore the pig ship and find thousands more pigs stowed in the bowels of the vessel.
As they say, there's a lot more than we thought, which is a goosebump-inducing moment even if you don't read Breitbart.
Red tries to warn his fellow birds, insisting that they at least consider some kind of vetting process for the endless waves of pigs crashing into their world.
The initial thrill of spice-inducing multiculturalism gives way to a dangerous overrunning of Bird Island.
I suppose one way to look at it is that it can be interesting and fun to have a few pigs around, but what happens when they're able to outvote you?
One thing I guess is that...
No one will be eating pig anymore.
One problem with migrant crime in Europe is that after committing sex crimes, the migrants often claim to be 15 or so, no matter how old they actually look, in order to escape punishment.
This jumped into my mind, at least, when what looked like a young pig jumped into a young woman's arms.
At first, she seemed delighted, until the young pig propositioned her in a deep voice, at which point she jumped back.
And throw it away in horror.
Now the masculine virtues of skepticism, alertness to danger, and wariness of the stated intentions of outsiders, these have all been attacked, scorned, rehabilitated on Bird Island, and any doubt about the value of inviting all the pigs in the world in is quite literally shouted down.
At one point the judge tells Red that his skepticism is making their guests uncomfortable, and thus he should shut the hell up.
Political correctness has led to an inability to handle discomfort, which has led to manipulation by those pretending to be offended.
Now, the stealing of the eggs.
Well, this is of course central to the entire story.
As it turns out, the pigs really like to eat bird eggs and so steal them all, pack them on their ship and sail back home.
For me, this is an analogy for the basic disastrous demographic reality that in a welfare state, endless waves of immigrants take precious resources from the native population and give them over to the immigrants.
This transfer of resources inevitably lowers the birth rate of the domestic population while massively increasing the birth rates of the immigrants.
A literal transfer of eggs.
Massive immigration into a country is not the same country plus immigrants, but rather the country plus immigrants minus millions of natives.
Massive immigration is not an addition to a population, but rather a displacement of the population.
Now, in order to remain true to the video game inspiration for the movie, the pigs have to leave and retreat behind their big city walls so that the birds can arc over to attack them.
This, of course, is not how mass immigration into Europe is going to play out, to put it mildly.
One of the earliest myths of mankind is that during a time of penultimate crisis...
Ancient heroes will return to the land in order to rescue society from its own blind and self-destructive foolishness.
Just as Churchill displaced Chamberlain and Trump seems poised to displace Obama, heroes are resurrected in the hour of need and then are generally banished back to their crypts when the danger has passed, just as Churchill was voted out of office at the end of World War II. Fulfilling this myth, the three bird friends decide to climb a mountain in search of the Great Eagle, a legendary figure who possesses the power of flight.
In a somewhat agonizingly extended sequence, they finally encounter the Great Eagle as he is taking an endless piss into a giant lake.
This is nothing more or less than a reminder that men, who pee standing up, have penises, by which they achieve this feat.
Hello and welcome back masculinity!
Now for Europe, the great eagle is America, which Europe regularly scorns and ridicules and denigrates before begging it to save Europe from itself.
Which has happened quite a few times in the past and is likely to happen again.
Sometime soon.
For Americans, the great eagle is Donald Trump.
From the wispy flyaway hair to the aging pot belly to a direct reference to a bankruptcy, the movie makes it clear that sometimes genuine salvation comes in the form of seemingly clownish pomposity.
The Great Eagle lives in halls of wealth filled with trophies and treasures and engages in distracted, rambling speeches peppered with occasional bursts of Shakespearean wisdom and proves crucial in the fight to come.
Does that sound familiar at all?
Now, after the great egg theft, in what is a truly moving sequence, the chastened and humiliated bird brains gather together on the shore to stare teary-eyed at the trail of wreckage left by the departing pig ships.
The judge, recognizing that the reign of foolishness has drawn to a close, offers up everyone to the leadership of Red, who was the only person to see this disaster coming.
Now some people have theorized that the judge represents Angela Merkel.
But I say, why limit the representation to only one European leader?
Red reminds the assembled featherheads that they are descended from dinosaurs and might find anger and outrage useful emotions to rediscover, to put it mildly.
Red has evolved from someone being punished for being angry to a summoner of righteous anger in the tribe.
In other words, the females found his anger uncomfortable in the past, but now they need his anger to get their eggs back.
The concluding fight scenes are visually amusing and kaleidoscopically hyperkinetic.
It is sometimes hard to know exactly what is going on but the glimpses you get are fun.
Naturally, it turns out that Matilda, the one in charge of the anger management program, has the magical ability to shoot fireballs out of her bird butt, which is one of the few clichés even this independent movie falls into.
The bird bomb, for instance, has to struggle to ignite himself, while Matilda has magical explosive capacities without effort.
Men need to earn their powers, women just have them.
Men must earn resources to access the eggs women are just born with.
I go into this in more detail in my review of the movie Frozen, where the men have to carve ice by hand and saw while the women just shoot it out of their nipples or whatever.
After the battle is won and the eggs are returned, there is a commitment on Bird Island to remember the value of anger and masculinity.
To train the children how to growl and snarl, and one can only hope that this reminder of the need for vigilance in a dangerous world is not soon forgotten, just as I hope it will not soon be forgotten in the West.
It is actually pretty sad that it takes a children's movie to explore a crisis, but that is always the way in dictatorships.
In King Lear, only the fool could tell the truth to the king.
Thou shouldst not have been old before thou were wise.
