One marriage, two movie reviews: Gold

Zac Efron in Gold. Photo / Supplied

Greg and Zanna find themselves stuck in the middle of the desert with Zac Efron.

SCORES
Beginning: 5
Middle: 3
End: 0

SHE SAW

We're too old to have been caught up in the High School Musical mania of the mid-2000s but we recently watched it for a family movie night and, as it turns out, I'm not too old to drown in Zac Efron's dreamy blue eyes - creepy, I know. Unfortunately though, those infinity pools were barely perceptible next to the pus-filled blisters covering his sun-damaged skin that got increasingly worse throughout the 97 minutes of Gold.

The first 20 minutes of this film are quite captivating - a dystopian not-so-distant future in which Efron flees his home and decides to take a multi-day car journey through an unidentified desert to get to a mysterious place called "the compound". On the way, he stumbles across an enormous nugget of gold. He and his driver agree that he will stay with the gold while the driver takes the multi-day journey back to get an excavator to get it out. As this was being set up, a sense of impending doom came over me as I realised it was going to be a Castaway-style silent narrative of a man surviving in the wild. Snore.

The commentary on the human condition at the heart of this film - even when the whole world has come to rack and ruin, man will still risk his life for a hunk of gold - isn't particularly groundbreaking but is always worth pondering. Is money humanity's real god? Will gold be the true second coming when the numbers on our digital bank balances cease to mean anything? There's an intellectual and philosophical rabbit hole to fall down after watching this film that is probably more interesting than the film itself.

Efron's performance is strong and I enjoyed the experience of watching it more than I expected after the premise was revealed. But as Greg and I discussed it later, I found quite a lot to fault in it. Without spoiling the film, I'll just say that the end trivialised the preceding two hours and, however purposeful that was, it was ultimately unsatisfying. There were a lot of unanswered questions and what it ended up achieving in its running time could have been achieved in a short film. If it had to be a feature, it would've benefited from losing about 15 minutes in the middle of the desert somewhere.

I suspect many men will spend the duration of this movie contemplating their own ability to survive alone in the desert. Certainly not Greg though: we both know he'd be a goner.

HE SAW

The scorpion was clearly a symbol of some kind. I asked Zanna what she thought it was. She said she thought it was there to show that Zac Efron, who didn't kill it, was a nice guy who didn't want to kill people.
"Okay," I said, "but there's clearly something else going on with it. Like, if you're going to put a scorpion in your movie, surely it stands for something."
"Sure," she said. "Well it also shows he's… "
"No," I said. "The scorpion. Not Zac Efron. The scorpion. What does the scorpion mean?"
"Yes," she said, "I understand, and thank you for condescending to me, but I'm just saying that it's showing Zac Efron…"

At that stage we were just walking back in the door. Two-thirds of the kids were still awake, so I didn't get to hear any more about Zac Efron, but I did wonder why she was so obsessed with him when I had made it clear my interest was in the scorpion. All she could talk about was Zac Efron, as if she too was a delirious person in a desert, no longer sure what mattered, except for Zac Efron.

To some extent it's understandable, because after the movie's initial set-up, not much seems to happen: We're stuck in the desert with only Zac Efron and his increasingly sun-blistered face for company, so the fact this movie is still quite compelling is some commendable sleight of hand from film-maker Anthony Hayes, who cast himself as the film's other main character, alongside Zac Efron.

The film hinges on a series of bad decisions by Efron's character, the chief one being related to the life-changing pile of gold he stumbles upon and, for a long time, it appears to be an intriguing study of psychological breakdown under extreme physical stress, until the whole thing is undermined by the ending, which is so laughable that several people in the theatre actually laughed at it. Maybe it was supposed to be funny, although if so, it wasn't funny enough to carry it off.

If I had walked out of the movie with five minutes to go, even two minutes to go, I might have thought it was a pretty good film, but a bad ending ruins everything, casts a shadow over all that has come before. It's one thing to hold an audience's attention for 90 minutes, another thing to make a movie that coheres, is meaningful, has an impact, stays with you, makes you think. If, when you leave a film, the only thing you can think about is Zac Efron, something has gone quite wrong with that film. In retrospect, Zanna was probably right about the scorpion.

Gold is in cinemas from Thursday.