Hurricane (Censored) by 30 Seconds to Mars
(I’d recommended watching the uncensored version here)
Dear Jared Leto, please start directing feature films already. Love, me.
When I first saw the teaser for this clip I was supremely disappointed. A trailer that really used the “sex sells” premises - cutting together all the sexually explicit scenes in a way that seemed purely for shock value.
I have issues with any director using sex or gore or violence as a shock tactic when it’s inclusion is not necessary and doesn’t benefit the story. But watch Hurricane through and it actually does benefit the story. Drives it in some cases.
What is the story? Well, that’s a different question entirely. I attempted to follow and then I got lost in the abs. Dear lord, those abs…
What I love best about this short film (I will indulge the creators and refer to it as such), is that we’re first introduced to it as a dream, not reality. The line between the two will always blur depending on your outlook but this story is so presented to us as a dream - and it feels like a dream.
To me, the stand out way in which this is done is the editing. Though 30STM clips always have amazing editing, this video and the use of slow motion gives us this sense of augmented time throughout the whole story. And that’s exactly how dreams feel. We have no idea how long they take or a sense of time within the dream. This, combined with the fast paced jump cuts of the racier or seemingly out of place scenes gives that sensation we get from waking and attempting to remember what it was we had running through out subconscious the night before.
Ok, so that whole Jared Leto is a perished American soldier is a bit on the wank side, but overlooking that (and maybe some of the nudity is for shock value), and adding in certain elements you’d find in a Richard Kelly film, for a whole 13 minutes - because this short film didn’t drop my attention once - I felt like I was in a dream. Jumping from one place to the next, multiple versions of the same person, not being able to explain why or how certain elements are in place or certain events happened. Random Terry Richardson. That’s what a dream feels like.
And they’ve sure portrayed that better than Inception ever did.
p.s If you couldn’t freeze on the text frame, it says “Find the argus apocraphex” which you can read all about here.
