Rampage

The Architecture of Noise

There is a peculiar dissonance at the heart of the modern video game adaptation. The original medium is defined by agency—the player’s tactile control over chaos. Cinema, conversely, is a medium of observation. When a director attempts to translate the 8-bit nihilism of a game like *Rampage*—which, in its 1986 arcade iteration, possessed no narrative beyond the joyous demolition of city blocks—into a narrative feature, the result is often a fascinating, if frustrating, collision of intent. Brad Peyton’s 2018 film stands as a monument to this conflict: a picture that yearns to be a chaotic spectacle of mass destruction but feels compelled to tether itself to a sentimental, human story that the genre cannot support.

Peyton, collaborating for the third time with Dwayne Johnson, constructs a visual language that can best be described as "destruction porn." The film operates on a scale of exhaustion. We are presented with three genetically modified alpha predators—a wolf, a crocodile, and the central albino gorilla, George—converging on Chicago. The visual effects, provided by Weta Digital, are technically proficient yet emotionally weightless. We watch skyscrapers crumble and military hardware dissolve, but the destruction lacks the tactile horror of a true disaster film or the awe of *Godzilla*. Instead, the violence is rendered with a glossy, digital sheen. When the mutated wolf leaps from the forest canopy to intercept a helicopter, defying all laws of physics, the film admits its own absurdity. It is a moment of pure, unadulterated cartoon logic, yet it is shot with a self-serious grey palette that suggests a grittier war film.

Amidst this digital cacophony stands Dwayne Johnson, playing primatologist Davis Okoye. Johnson is less an actor in this film than a stabilizing architectural element. His performance is immutable; he is the Teflon monolith against which the script’s absurdities crash and slide off. The film’s emotional core attempts to rest on the relationship between Davis and George. Their communication via sign language is meant to provide the "heart" that blockbuster cinema so desperately safeguards. However, these interactions—including a recurring, juvenile gag involving a crude hand gesture—often undercut the creature's majesty. We are asked to view George as a victim of corporate greed and genetic meddling (a heavy theme for a movie about giant monsters), but the film treats him alternately as a tragic figure and an action figure, never quite deciding if he is a soul or a weapon.

The surrounding human element fares worse. The narrative collapses under the weight of its own exposition, embodied by the villainous Wyden siblings (Malin Åkerman and Jake Lacy), whose corporate malice is so caricature-like it belongs in a different decade. Conversely, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, playing a government agent, seems to have wandered in from a darker, more interesting film, delivering his lines with a scenery-chewing relish that highlights the woodenness of the rest of the cast.

Ultimately, *Rampage* is a film of disconnected organs—a heart that beats for a CGI ape, a brain focused on genetic pseudoscience, and fists that want only to smash. It reflects a Hollywood ecosystem that mistakes volume for value, assuming that if the monsters are big enough, the audience will not notice the hollowness of the destruction. It is a loud, frenetic echo of a game that was simple fun, transformed into a film that is complicatedly empty.