Nicolas Cage’s New Character Insists He Is Nobody In The Ghostland First Look Video
This article is more than 2 years old
Nicolas Cage is a renegade former bank robber in a post-apocalyptic setting who finds himself in a really sticky Crank-like situation in a recent clip from his new movie, Prisoners of Ghosttown. The Face/Off actor is in an interesting phase of his career, playing roles that are definitely badass, but also sort of parodies of wild Nicolas Cage-type characters. Since Mandy broke the mold in 2018 and set him off on a journey of (even more) weirdness, the actor has been taking on interesting, albeit decidedly not A-list material, roles.
Such is the case with Prisoners of the Ghostland. In the clip from the Shudder exclusive film, Nicolas Cage is a man on a post-apocalyptic adventure to earn his own freedom under the employ of some very nefarious characters. The clip shows Cage touching down in what seems to be a colony of survivors of the wasteland (known in this movie as the Ghostland), and he doesn’t have time for anything but his mission. He pretty much ignores the colony’s leader welcoming him and explaining how dire his situation is in favor of showing the townspeople a photo of a woman named Beatrice who he is tasked with finding. Fortunately, the people recognize her, and it seems his adventure is set to begin.
Nicolas Cage plays a hero uncreatively named Hero, who was imprisoned for his part in a completely botched bank robbery just before a cataclysmic event rendered a good portion of Japan uninhabitable and quarantined. However, when a villain who goes by the name of the Governor loses one of the forced brides he calls “granddaughters” out in the Ghostland, he sends Hero on a mission to find her in exchange for his freedom. However, there’s a catch. To ensure he actually goes through with his mission, Hero is outfitted in an all-leather suit that, in addition to being horrible attire for a desert setting, it is rigged with explosives designed to go off if he misbehaves, hurts Beatrice or runs out of time to complete his mission, according to ScreenRant.
Collider notes that the movie, while another bonkers and mold-breaking installment destined for Shudders’ library of content, it gets points for its highly stylized vision of the apocalypse. For a genre that can be overdone, the film imagines a world in which the survivors live on a blend of pre-modern and modern Japanese culture mixed with a hearty amount of the American wild west. While this isn’t technically the most original vision of the future (looking at you Firefly, even though that was Chinese-inspired), it’s a difficult line to walk and it’s clearly something that hasn’t been given its fair shake in movies or TV in the past. Certainly not with the unique and over-the-top gravitas that Nicolas Cage brings to his work.
Whether it’s fighting crazy freakin evil in Mandy or wasting apocalyptic mutants in Prisoners of the Ghostland, it’s clear that Nicolas Cage is in a really weird but utterly captivating place in his career. Viewers could do worse than checking out his latest slip into exploring madness and campiness once the movie hits streaming on Nov. 19.
