In news of such magnitude that it scarcely bears repeating here, the trailer for the new Jason Statham movie was released last week. I’m sure you knew.
In his new movie, the latest from an entire career in the “effortlessly maiming henchmen” genre, Statham plays The Beekeeper, a beekeeper who is also a beekeeper, part of a secret organisation called The Beekeepers who work to protect the “hive” of human civilisation from the sort of problems that can be solved with karate. But he’s also literally a beekeeper. It’s… deeply confusing.
I honestly don’t understand how this has happened. If you had a superhero whose powers were flame-based and he called himself Fire Fighter, but he also worked as a firefighter, you’d be rejected by every publisher and script editor on earth because the premise is too confusing. If you had an under-age hero who was made of some sort of incredibly hard mineral, and his name was Coal Minor, but he also worked as a Coal Miner, you’d… Well, you’d be in breach of child labour laws, for a start, but also the fact that I’ve had to stretch this far for a second example proves that it’s actually quite difficult to come up with ideas that are this dumb and confusing on purpose. And yet still, we have The Beekeeper, in which Jason Statham is some sort of ninja apiarist1.
From what I can figure out, one of three things has happened here, and I’m too damn lazy to look into it so it’s going to be a “choose your own solution” sort of situation.
Option 1: Rise of the Robots.
With the Hollywood writers’ strike still fresh in the memory, we shouldn’t underestimate how desperate Hollywood executives - a parasitic species that outwardly resemble humans but lack souls or any creative instinct - have become to have Artificial Intelligence write scripts. AI doesn’t need paying at all! It never takes breaks! It will just churn out endless movies and TV shows, forever!
The unfortunate truth, however, is that even our current breed of headline-grabbing super A.I.s are really just language software that has learned to insert the next most likely word in a sentence. I’m not saying that A.I. programs are dumb enough that they mis-interpreted the prompt “B-Movie with Jason Statham,” and to prove it I double checked…
…but A.I.s are also not even close to interpreting their prompts in the way a human brain would. They’re not really an enormous leap forward from predictive text messaging on a phone. As such, they can’t actually write anything that makes any sense over a long period of time. (See above.) They can write conversational messages back to users, or create short pieces of text based on prompts, but an A.I. doesn’t really understand things like storylines or plot logic. Which might be what has happened with the new Jason Statham film - they’ve had an A.I. attempt to write an action movie and it has become stuck in a loop due to a glitch that wasn’t noticed until too late in production. A.I. movies look passable on a surface level, and with Hollywood desperate for material they may have greenlit this project without reading it all the way through. As such, MovieBot 4.0 spat out a script where [JASON STATHAM] plays a [BEEKEEPER] who is secretly a [BEEKEEPER] working for an elite team of [BEEKEEPERS] called the [BEEKEEPERS] in order to [Error: Beekeeper Not Found. Please Beekeeper the Beekeeeper in access port Beekeeper.]
Option 2: The Lone Gunman.
Never underestimate what a determined maniac can accomplish on his own.
Or her own, I guess, but let’s be honest: Nine times out of ten, when we talk about a lone maniac, it’s a he/him situation.
Years ago, I remember looking in the window of a second hand book store and laughing when I noticed that there was a full set of “Teach Yourself Karate/Kung Fu/Judo” books for sale. I instantly imagined some poor, battered man arriving at the book store with all of these DIY fighting manuals under his arm, his other arm in a sling, his face still bruised from whatever savage beating he’d recently undergone, and dumping them on the counter before loudly declaring “These are BULLSHIT!” and limping back out.
Something similar may have happened with The Beekeeper. Maybe the screenplay for the movie was the sole passion project of a kid who was relentlessly bullied for living on a honey farm when he was in school. Maybe the kids called him Honey and he hated it. He bottled all of his seething rage and humiliation and swore to himself that one day, he’d make the world think that beekeepers were badass and cool. He used this resentment to fuel him through film school, where every script he wrote was about bee keepers who were also secret special forces operatives. His every script was rejected for being “too bee-focused,” but he never lost hope.
Then the writers’ strike happened and Hollywood had to start digging out whatever scripts were lying around, and somehow, for this one sad insect farmer, the dream finally came true.
Option 3: Not The Bees!
According to researcher Stephen Buchmann, who may or may not be the screenwriter from scenario 2, bees can “learn, remember, think and make decisions.” That’s honestly pretty impressive for such a tiny organism, but also raises a scarier prospect.
Bees are in trouble, globally. It’s one of the world’s problems that can’t be solved through having Jason Statham kick it in the face, which is terrifying when you consider that we solve everything from street crime to giant sharks by sending Jason Statham to kick it in the face.
Without bees to pollinate plants, ecological collapse will soon follow, and as such the survival of bees should be a high priority to everyone on earth. As with most existential threats, however, we sit here, stranded, and we’re all doing our best to deny it.
If bees are as clever as Stephen Buchmann believes, is it really so unrealistic to think that they’d stage their own propaganda campaign? Infiltrate human movies, either by working as a team to press individual keys until they’ve written a screenplay or else through controlling human brains, crawling into a script-writer’s ear while they sleep and having them pen a movie about how important beekeepers are?
Obviously yes, this is patent insanity, but how the hell else are we going to explain how this film ever got made?!
Whatever the rationale, The Beekeeper is apparently in cinemas early next year. Although it’s too early to tell if it’s generating any buzz.
Ninjapiarist. Better title.