The Gods Must Be Crazy

I first saw the movie The Gods Must Be Crazy many years ago, and hadn't watched it in quite a while. It recently started showing up in the FXM rotation, so I DVRed it to watch again and do a post on it here. It's got another showing tomorrow morning at 3:00 AM, so now's the time for the post on it.

The Gods Must Be Crazy has three main story lines, more or less. The first one, and the one that's the genesis for the movie's title, involves the Bushmen of the Kalahari, in what is now northeastern Namibia (at the time South West Africa, a colony of the apartheid-era South Africa). They're presented as having an idyllic life, which was out of date even for 1980 when the movie was released, and probably never true as life in humanity's more primitive days was, to use the words of Thomas Hobbes, nasty, brutish, and short. The Bushmen are presented as living in harmony with nature, in small family units with basically no posessions other than what they can carry on the back.

But then, somebody in an airplane flying overhead drops a Coca-Cola bottle out of the plane, with it falling to the ground and not breaking, one family, with father Xi (N!xau), finds it and finds this hard clear thing is useful for a whole bunch of purposes. But everybody wants to use it, leading to the entirely human emotions of jealousy and possessiveness, along with violence. It's decided that this will never do, so they have to get rid of the "Evil Thing", and the only way to do that is to throw it off the end of the world.

Several hundred miles to the south is Johannesburg, South Africa. It's a city born of white European civilisation, with all of the difficulties and stresses that come with modern life. One resident is Kate Thompson (Sandra Prinsloo), who works at a local newspaper. Her life is stressful enough that, having read an article about the severe shortage of teachers in Botswana, she decides she's going to pull up stakes and go to Botswana for a while to teach. Elsewhere in Botswana is Andrew Steyn (Marius Weyers), doing doctoral work on the migration patterns of elephants that requires his collection samples of elephant droppings and analyzing their chemical composition. Andrew is asked to pick up Kate at the bus stop, but Andrew is notoriously awkward around women.

Several hundred miles north of the Kalahari is some African country which has been decolonised and has a black president who is opposed by some self-styled liberation group led by Sam Boga (Louw Verwey). He leads a coup against the current government, but it fails, only killing a couple of cabinet ministers and only wounding the president. The legitimate army goes after Boga and his men, who try to flee to Mozambique (at least, that's what it sounded like they were saying), which seems rather far away. Their route takes them through Botswana, as does Xi's route. So eventually, the people in all three plotlines are going to come together.

The Gods Must Be Crazy is a fun movie, as it deftly handles three disparate plots before bringing them all together. There are things that some people probably won't like, especially the attitude towards the Bushman, which as I said at the beginning was outdated. It also leans too much on the "noble savage" trope, to the point that it posits no violence whatsoever amongst the Bushmen. But I think part of this is deliberately exaggerated to present a contrast with white westernized life. Some of the comedy is turned slapstick by speeding things up, which may not appeal to some viewers either. There's also the dubbing of Prinsloo (and, I think, Weyers, although Prinsloo's is much more noticeable).

But the good vastly outweighs the bad, here, I think. But the situational humor mostly works, as does some of the dialog, notably a line from Steyn's assistant about marriage. I was also somewhat surprised to see Thompson having a black colleague at the newspaper, since I would have guessed that was a no-no under apartheid. (I suppose the character might have been a dark-skinned Indian, or a mixed-race Coloured.)

If you haven't seen it before, I strongly recommend taking a look at The Gods Must Be Crazy.