The Last Faust

2019 • 108 minutes

About this movie

'The Last Faust' transposes Goethe's epic saga of damnation to the year 2059. Faust's successor, Dr Goodfellow (Steven Berkoff) is the CEO of Winestone, the world's largest and most secretive tech firm. His predecessor Dr Faust sold his soul, traded for the creation of the first Superhuman, to the devil Mephisto. However in the process, he unleashes a much darker force, an AI-based neural network on to the world.

Ratings and reviews

THE HUMM COLLECTION – THE LAST FAUST – VIDEO – 2019 - It deserves a review od quite a few thousand words. I am limited here. This film is a stage production, mostly in various stage settings, some outside backgrounds too into which the action and the characters are embedded. Some of the backgrounds are digitally produced. My first watching of the film made me think there was a lot of storytelling and little action. The actors were acting as if on a stage – which was the case, a sound stage – and not as if in a real outside location. I also feel the text has been clearly recorded before or after shooting in a sound studio; The voices and the sound are absolutely perfect and devoid of any interfering noise. That’s when I watched it a second time, after reading the novella that I found rich but explosive, meaning going in all directions, with time travel back to any past and forward to any date in the “present” that is revealed to be the future in the video, precisely 2059, 71 x 29. But apparently no mystery behind this number that is the product of two prime numbers. To get rid of all hidden symbolism, let me deal with Paris’s real identity which counts 19 characters: CO2KKOCDTPY4Z-2- -27, but this identity does not seem to have any mysterious meaning and is not one more Mary Poppins’s super-duper magic word. But with the second watching the whole story became really clear though all the allusions to mythology and to Goethe’s Faust 1 & 2 are not always translucid or we are not very intimate with Goethe’s plays to follow the intricacies. Strangely enough, it is not essential. The storytelling is clear, the storyteller is clear and the scenes that cut up the storytelling are also clearly positioned in the story and in time. The timeline, though chronologically chaotic is clear visually because the various times are clearly indicated by the setting (Dr. Goodfellow’s mother’s house is the modern time, in fact, 2059 but the house being entirely off any kind of communicational grid it is clearly a house that could be in some French wealthy suburb) and the producer and director use clear ways to shift from one period to another, either visual or computerized means, or audio means essentially music. The costumes too are rather specific to the times, though the use of mini, short, calf-long and angle-long white burkas are timeless though a direct allusion to Islamic burkas with the color and the varying length being at odd with this reference. The meaning of such a costume is difficult to catch, especially since these women are sex-objects and represent Faust’s permanent desire for women. The other costumes are clear. The Northern German Empire is clearly represented by Austrian leather pants and other rather Germanic elements. The image of the Pope on the background in a couple of scenes is an actor wearing a white cassock (if we can say that for the Pope’s robe) similar to the Pope’s. The most surprising costumes are those of angels with wings and deep cleavage (singular since only the breast cleavage is concerned and there is no callipygian tantalizing) making these angels very feminine and with great frontal sex-appeal. The other women Faust desires are also more or less sexily dressed. Yet the Goddess in the sky, Mater Gloriosa wearing the traditional three colors of France, Great Britain or the USA and thus being a reference to these tricolors is not in any way sexually enhanced. Yet all the women except the three Phorkyads who are grotesque in their extreme obesity, are standard western beautiful women right out of Playboy if it still exists, or equivalent. [...]