A hot young cast, a dystopian future and a sci-fi angle may be the selling points of Jake Paltrow’s pioneering epic, but the new Hunger Games this isn’t.
Set in a future where water is scarce, Ernest Holm (Michael Shannon), his son Jerome (Kodi Smit-McPhee) and daughter Mary (Elle Fanning) trade in alcohol with the help of their robo-donkey, while trying to convince local contractors to provide irrigation to their once-fertile, now arid land, so they can grow crops and begin a new life.
Meanwhile, wilful Mary has begun a relationship with bad boy Flem (Nicholas Hoult, sneering, sexy and channelling Lee Van Cleef) whose plans aren’t so wholesome.
Distinctively dusty (Fanning using sand to wash the dishes is a chokingly dry image), bleak and brutal, Young Ones feels less for, err, young ones than an older new-western audience; its romance doomed, its protagonists forced to grow up in suffering while sci-fi elements (the robot cow, the exoskeleton Shannon’s paraplegic wife is fitted with) blend comfortably against the red/brown landscape.
Slow and unrelenting, expertly performed and extremely stylish, Young Ones couldn’t be further from Cowboys Vs Aliens , and could well set a new generation searching out John Ford and Sergio Leone.
