No, the first Purge that got this all started back in 2013, called The Purge.
Warning: The Purge spoilers to follow.
I did not like this film. In fact, "hated" may not have been too strong a word. I deemed 1.5 stars to be its appropriate star rating on Letterboxd. That's pretty close to hate.
But then I continued watching these movies, out of sequence, first Election Year, then The First Purge, then Anarchy just six months ago, which is 1-3-4-2 if you are keeping track of the overall sequence. I liked all of them to varying degrees and the first two quite a lot, with Election Year even landing in my top ten of 2016. But I'm going over a lot of the same territory as this post so I should move on to the observation du jour.
Given how I've felt about the subsequent films, I thought it was time to go back to consider the first again ... a little 1-3-4-2-1, if you will.
You know what? It's pretty good. Maybe even better than that.
If I had to go back and analyze why I didn't like it the first time, I'd say it's because the first movie should have been the second movie. We were introduced to a world that would bear a lot of fruit over the next decade, including an Amazon Prime TV show that I probably would be a good candidate to watch, where all crimes are legal for a 12-hour overnight period once a year. But we didn't really delve into that world in The Purge. We saw it only through the eyes of one family in what is essentially a home invasion movie.
It's a good home invasion movie, I've decided after my Saturday night revisit, but it still doesn't provide quite the breadth of social commentary that the later films would provide. We do get more than I remembered about the New Founding Fathers, the right-wing group that now dominates the government and created the purge, but we see them only in terms of their effect on brainwashed disciples. Maybe that wasn't the wrong way to approach it, but it obviously didn't land with me back in 2013. I remember clearly thinking "We've got this great concept, and then we see almost none of it."
Maybe it would have been more effective with me if the first movie had been a broader survey of individual groups of characters trying to survive the night, an approach taken by later movies in the series, especially since good home invasion movies were not in short supply at the time The Purge was released. It feels a bit like a "bottle episode" of a TV show, that term describing an intimate episode involving only a few characters in a single location after the larger themes and backdrops of the show have already been established. But who knows, maybe with another approach The Purge would have been one-and-done, instead of creating essentially its own cinematic universe.
Actually director and series auteur James DeMonaco does provide us this broader survey over the opening credits, in a sequence I'd forgotten, which chillingly gives us a whole movie's worth of bone crunching in the streets. It's essentially a montage of security camera footage of people shooting and stomping each other in close quarters. That actually felt like a generous amount of the blood and guts that has come to comprise the series in our minds.
Another thing I'd forgotten is that the film's central family, with Ethan Hawke and Lena Headey as the parents, houses a Black man being hunted by those New Founding Fathers disciples. I didn't think that the series' haves vs. have nots political agenda got going until the later films, but it was there from the start. Without race being explicitly referenced, The Purge makes clear that from its very origins, this night of violence was conceived as a way of exterminating minorities -- an idea that gets explored more fully in The First Purge. The family goes through a believable series of emotional deliberations about whether to deliver this man to the people who are seeking him, in order to save their own skins, or to fight the would-be invaders who are using heavy artillery and battering rams to destroy their security system.
The things that still give me pause about this movie:
1) The motivations of the daughter's boyfriend. The Purge does a really nice job establishing what seems to be a real connection between the teenage daughter, played by Adelaide Kane, and her boyfriend, played by Tony Oller. They even have a little inside joke about how instead of saying "I love you" to each other, they will make a cute little growl, as a way of avoiding cliche. We have no reason to doubt he's a good boyfriend and that he really cares for her, though we know her father, played by Hawke, does not approve. That could just be because he's a conservative dickhead who sells high-end security systems.
But then when the purge starts, the boyfriend has snuck back into her house and gotten himself locked in behind the security doors. He tells her this is so he'll have time to plead his case that he's a worthy boyfriend to her father, without said father being able to kick him out. Sounds reasonable if a bit bold. But then, instead of talking to Ethan Hawke, he just pulls out a gun and tries to assassinate him.
The reason you don't kill your girlfriend's father is not because you're worried you'll get arrested and prosecuted for the crime. The reason you don't kill your girlfriend's father is that you supposedly love her, and she supposedly loves him. She won't love you much once you've killed her dad.
The movie's point could be that she has been dating a psychopath all this time, but if so, this doesn't contribute in any way to the movie's themes. We're not trying to explore the bad relationship choices of the daughter. And since her boyfriend is trying to kill her father at the exact same time as her brother is letting the injured Black man into their house, it doesn't function as its own distinct set piece, its own obstacle to be overcome within the narrative. Because the boyfriend receives a fatal gunshot wound when he and Hawke exchange fire and Hawke is barely grazed, this subplot is basically over before it begins, with little to no long-term effect on the narrative. Meaning it probably should never have been there in the first place. In theory, it functions as an emotional obstacle to be overcome between the father and the daughter, but she can't really blame him for shooting her boyfriend, as it was merely an act of self-defense.
2) The excessively casual attitude of the home invaders. I think one of the reasons this film felt like a bit of a retread is that it bears many similarities to Bryan Bertino's 2008 home invasion film The Strangers, in which demented mask-wearing psychopaths also try to break into a house. Maybe you have to have a bit of a screw loose when you are purging, but they have an entirely non-tactical approach to invading the home and killing its occupants. There's a lot more laughing and dancing through the hallways -- there's even a scene where a woman rides on a man's back, making them both pretty incapable of defending themselves against unseen combatants with guns.
They kick into action and show genuine fighting skills when they do confront Hawke or one of his family, but they've already squandered a large portion of their advantage at this point. And then when they do get chances to kill a member of the family -- each member at least once, I think -- they draw it out sadistically, giving another previously unseen member of the family a chance to shoot them. In fact, this same scene plays out about four times, where a masked maniac is about to bring down a machete on somebody's head before someone else pops up and shoots them.
So yeah, there's some dumb horror movie logic informing this movie, which is what I took away from it the first time I saw it. But it doesn't override the things the movie does well, including some really imaginative and feral fight sequences.
If we're really going to examine why I have a renewed appreciation of The Purge, we should look at a very different series of movies that no one would ever compare to this series.
When I first saw The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring at Christmastime in 2001, I didn't like it very much. I was about the only one who held this opinion, but I could not be swayed from it. There were certain things about it that impressed me a lot, but I was annoyed by all the crying and hand wringing over the death of a man who had been a traitor, Sean Bean's Boromir (oops, spoiler alert for Fellowship), and I felt at loose ends because the movie hasn't much of a definitive ending. At the time, we were unaccustomed to movie's being made with the absolute certainty that their sequels would be made, and that led to an unsatisfying ending that lingered as my primary takeaway.
A year later, I absolutely loved The Two Towers, and today it is still one of my top 50 movies of all time according to Flickchart. I felt similarly, though not as strongly, about the third in the series. Hence, when I eventually went back and watched Fellowship again, I had a whole new ability to appreciate it, embracing it as the first chapter in a story whose second and third chapters I dearly loved.
Now that I have the full context of the Purge series at my disposal, The Purge makes more sense to me. It isn't the failure to dramatize a terrific concept that I believed it to be the first time, or if it is, it's a choice that was redeemed by the fact that DeMonaco got to make more movies and to continue to explore this concept elsewhere. Eight years later, maybe it doesn't matter whether The Purge was the first or the fourth movie in the series. They're all part of a collection whose themes have spoken to me, and in some cases, even moved me.
Now about that TV series ...
