Reheated and not that tasty

Photo: NICOLAS DASSAS/NETFLIX

Food for thought is a precious commodity in the idea-hungry content landfill, which is probably one of the reasons for Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia's dystopian allegory The platform started a few years ago. Starting from a brilliantly simple and cruel sci-fi conceit, the Spanish thriller was set entirely in a futuristic prison – a tower of scantily clad two-person cells euphemistically referred to as a “Vertical Self-Management Center”, but colloquially as “The” pit is referred to by its unfortunate inhabitants. The entire prison population subsists on the same meal, served at a single table that arrives once a day on a descending platform and stops for a few minutes on each floor. What begins as a decadent feast on the top level is eaten along the way until people search for leftover food and lick empty dishes in the lower depths of the building. The message is clear but effective: we are all fighting for the same remains, The platform says — a capitalist critique that had a little more bite during the dog days of the first pandemic summer, when the film broke some streaming records on Netflix.

But at what point does a great premise start to feel a little overused? There is definitely quality left The platform 2in which the original's creative team descends into The Pit once again to follow a new cast of characters trapped in what could be called their own Hunger Games. The sequel isn't entirely lacking in fresh ideas, either conceptually or thematically; For one thing, the rules for its hellish setting – a symbolic pillar of class struggle, like Snowpiercer turned on its side – were adjusted. But this plate of reheated bites is also distinctive from the more substantial meal served in the original.

The platform The film ended on a hopeful note, with the literal and symbolic emergence of a child from the malnourished bowels of the pit. The platform 2 seems to begin with the aftermath of this revolutionary gesture, even if the eventual reintroduction of a familiar face calls into question the chronology of events. This time, everyone in the pit gets to choose their specific daily meal and it's up to each prisoner to eat only what they've been assigned. There is still not enough food, but it is a fairer arrangement, and a system of self-control has emerged to maintain it, as so-called loyalists have made it their mission to “pacify” the so-called barbarians, who are more consume more than they share in their daily bread (or pizza or cake or plums). Cannibalism is also now banned – a major blow to those below level 100 or so, where falling bodies provide a more reliable daily source of food than anything left on the table at the time.

Gaztelu-Urrutia, co-writer and director The platform 2seems this time to face the difficulty of realizing a political ideal, no matter how pure. One of The Pit's new rules is that if someone dies, no one is allowed to eat their share, even if they are starving, because that would be unfair to everyone else. But is wasting food in the name of equality a fair system? While the first film focused on how capitalism pits the 99 percent against itself, part two seems to focus more on the ways in which socialist principles can be perverted in implementation. The villain here is not the faceless authority who runs the prison, but a blind authoritarian (Óscar Jaenada) who upholds The Pit's new laws with terrible, disproportionate force. How many popular revolutions saw the old system replaced by a new fascism?

There's plenty to chew on The platform 2at least for a while. But the film's allegorical concerns were not paired with a particularly compelling drama this time. Instead of the original's portrait of political awakening, the sequel follows an artist (Milena Smit) who checks herself into the pit as a form of personal atonement. The heroine's eventual, inevitable descent into the lower rungs of this inferno, where hunger leads to madness, is little more than a therapeutic crucible – a generic odyssey of self-forgiveness. It's a shadow of The platformThe sharper bow that headed toward a similar goal, but had bigger fish to fry than one person's undigested guilt.

In typical sequel fashion The platform 2 Wheels out more of the same, emphasis on that more. The gory violence, with digital heads and limbs flying through the air in slow motion, is even more bloodthirsty. The battle – an extended battle between the loyalists and the barbarians – is more brutal and drawn out. But more can be less. And while Gaztelu-Urrutia takes its rehashed premise in the same downward direction as before, those who gratefully devoured the last entry in this series may decide they've had enough of it. Even food for thought can lose its flavor when thrown in the microwave.