SummaryJericho (Ethan Hawke) is an American soldier stationed in post-apocalyptic Rome under a pandemic and war-torn lockdown. After witnessing the Vatican blown up into the night sky, he sets out on a mission to uncover and document the truth for the world to see and stop the true terrorists responsible.
SummaryJericho (Ethan Hawke) is an American soldier stationed in post-apocalyptic Rome under a pandemic and war-torn lockdown. After witnessing the Vatican blown up into the night sky, he sets out on a mission to uncover and document the truth for the world to see and stop the true terrorists responsible.
This is a movie at which some will shrug and some will love. It’s a spiritually probing, deeply personal, stubbornly idiosyncratic work of art. It’s an Abel Ferrara film.
The intellectual take on the pandemic here is oblique. Still, the mood feels extraordinarily direct, like speaking on a telephone to a version of yourself from maybe half a year ago in lockdown number two or three, before there were vaccines and hope, when the winter nights were long and dawn seemed very far away.
Abel Ferrara's direction is not bad at all, despite the guerrilla style he implemented. And Hawke is reliable as ever, but even so, Zeros and Ones is a story that just never seems to come together.
It's in perfect line with what the director has been doing in recent years, but it was still a bit disappointing.
This feels like the final project of a sophomore film student. Way, way too much blurred and over filtered scenes, almost no plot, yet some giant international incident that may or may not have happened. You don’t even see anything happen, it’s just a blurry mess and occasional shot of Ethan Hawke saying or doing something super serious. It’s so bad, Hawke had to do a prologue and epilogue about the film, at least on Hulu, to show his support of the director. Save yourself the 87 minutes.
Indecipherable to a fault but in the end surprisingly hopeful, Zeros and Ones feels like diving into a murky river to search for a missing object, fully aware one might never find it but still willing to get wet in its slush for the sake of trying.
Zeros and Ones isn’t much of an entertaining sit — watching it feels like dusting off a cryptic artifact from a bygone civilization, its pleasures more archaeological than anything else — but every frame of this weird soup is suffused with the restless creative spirit of someone who’s been waiting for a new world order, and recognizes that we only get so many chances to make it happen.
The scrambled narrative, listless pace, clumsy stabs at profundity and severe lack of humor will limit the film’s appeal to existing converts and cult movie connoisseurs.
(Mauro Lanari)
The exasperated formal experimentalism leads nowhere if it supports a thesis as the ambivalence of reality. God would hide in the world and it would be up to us to see the apocalyptic glass half empty or the integrated, condescending, glass half full. This would be the (provisional?) conclusion of Ferrara's decades-long analysis. Revolutionize existence (Marx) or accept it (Jesus)? Destroy the Vatican as a "symbol of Christianity" (sic, instead of "Catholicism") or preserve it? Perhaps to achieve the much longed-for reconciliation/redemption you need a real or metaphorical drug, such as sex (the scene of the copula starring his wife Cristina Chiriac) or such the gaze of a child. Abel finds himself by getting lost between the obstetrics and pediatrics wards.
They say "don't judge book by it's cover", this is for sure one of that cases. From a description and a poster i thought this is going to be some kind of campy pseudo-militarry movie where Ethan Hawke has to save the pope, but he's not a believer, so he gotta find a faith trough his identical twin brother first. Well, let's not judge this movie by what it's not. This is a moody "thriller" experience with cinema language out of this world. I choose to watch it one evening cause it was pretty short and i was on a time-limit, despite that it felt like 3 hours. Most of the scenes full of nonsensical dialogue which some may find "spiritual" not me tho, for me it was that one thing that kept me laughing line after line. Plot is non-exitant, it's not like i didn't get what happened, it's just there was no point to it. Ethan Hawke's character JJ was looking for his brother on empty streets while making some connections with locals. Guess this whole movie was going for eyes wide shut vibe, where you don't suppose to know what's happening and be in a dream-like state. The intro and outro scenes for the movie where Ethan Hawke as himself may tip you off to the same conclusion. Overall this movie is much more compelling on paper then in reality, well, i guess you gotta try it for yourself, if you won't be put off by the weird out of place military drums, music is really fitting and if you may be on the same wavelength with the city of Vatican you may find some enjoyment in this flick.