Reheated and Not as Tasty

Food for thought is a precious commodity in the idea-famished content landfill, which is probably one reason Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia’s dystopian allegory The Platform took off a few years ago. Commencing from an ingeniously simple and cruel science-fiction conceit, the Spanish thriller took place entirely within a futuristic prison — a tower of sparsely dressed, two-person cells euphemistically dubbed a”Vertical Self-Management Center,” but colloquially referred to as The Pit by its unlucky occupants. The entire inmate population subsists on the same meal, laid out across a single table that arrives on a descending platform once a day, stopping at each floor for a few minutes. What starts as a decadent feast on the top level is nibbled away en route, until those in the lower depths of the building are scrounging for scraps and licking empty dishes. The message is blunt but effective: We’re all fighting for the same leftovers, The Platform says — a capitalistic critique that had a little extra bite during the dog days of the first pandemic summer, when the film smashed some streaming records on Netflix.

But at what point does a great premise start to feel a little picked over? There’s definitely a leftover quality to The Platform 2, in which the creative team of the original descends once more into The Pit to follow a new cast of characters caught in what you could call their own hunger games. The sequel isn’t totally starved for fresh ideas, conceptual or thematic; for one, the rules governing its hellish setting — a symbolic column of class warfare, like the Snowpiercer flipped on its side — have been tweaked. But there’s also no mistaking this plate of reheated morsels for the fuller meal the original served.

The Platform closed on a note of hope, with the literal and symbolic rise of a child from the malnourished bowels of the Pit. The Platform 2 seems to commence from the aftermath of that revolutionary gesture, even as the eventual reintroduction of a familiar face calls the chronology of events into question. This time around, 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 rationed. There’s still not enough food, but it’s a more equitable arrangement, and a system of self-policing has arisen to upheld it, as so-called Loyalists have taken it upon themselves to “pacify” the so-called Barbarians who consume more than their share of the daily bread (or pizza or cake or plums). Cannibalism is now forbidden, too — a real blow to those below level 100 or so, where plummeting bodies are a more dependable source of daily nutrition than whatever’s left on the table by that point.

Gaztelu-Urrutia, who co-wrote as well as directed The Platform 2, seems to be getting this time at the difficulty of realizing a political ideal, no matter how pure. One of the new rules of The Pit is that if someone dies, no one is allowed to eat their share, even if they’re starving, because that would be unfair to everyone else. But is wasting food in the name of equality a just system? If the first film took aim at how capitalism pits the 99 percent against itself, part two seems more focused on the ways that socialist principles can be perverted in implementation. The villain here isn’t the faceless authority running the prison but a blind authoritarian (Óscar Jaenada) who upholds the new laws of The Pit with horrific, disproportionate violence. How many revolutions of the people have found their old system replaced by a new fascism?

There’s plenty to chew on in The Platform 2, at least for a while. But the film’s allegorical interests haven’t been paired this time with a particularly involving drama. In place of the original’s portrait of political awakening, the sequel follows an artist (Milena Smit) who’s checked 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 Platform’s more pointed arc, which moved towards a similar destination 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 the more. The gory violence, sending digital heads and limbs flying in slow motion, is gorier. The combat — an extended battle between the Loyalists and the Barbarians— is more brutal and protracted. But more can be less. And as Gaztelu-Urrutia takes his warmed-over premise in the same downward direction he’s taken it before, those who gratefully gobbled up the last entry in this franchise may decide they’ve had their fill. Even food for thought can lose its flavor when thrown in the microwave.