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Wile E. Coyote has employed every conceivable gadget in his fruitless, decades-long pursuit of the Road Runner.
But what if this futility isn’t his fault? What if it’s the fault of the Acme Corporation? What if the company behind such items as the “Instant Tunnel” and the “Do-It-Yourself Tornado Kit” just makes bad products?
That’s the premise of Coyote vs. Acme, in which our hapless hero engages an equally hapless lawyer to take on the Acme Corporation in court for the physical suffering he’s endured using their products.
WATCH | The official trailer for Coyote vs. Acme:
The film finally hits theatres Friday after taking a circuitous route to the big screen. (Completed in 2023, it was shelved by Warner Bros. Discovery as a tax write-off, and only revived when independent distributor Ketchup Entertainment bought the rights last year.)
To celebrate the spirit of the film, we’ve catalogued our favourite anti-capitalist movies from the last 40 years.
RoboCop (1987)
WATCH | Official trailer for RoboCop:
A once-outlandish film that feels more like a documentary with every passing year, Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop imagines a near future where a company called Omni Consumer Products essentially runs the Detroit police department. Omni’s killer app is the titular man-machine (played with deadpan sass by Peter Weller), who soon learns of the brutal lengths Omni executive Dick Jones is willing to go to scale the corporate ladder. The only complication: Robocop has been expressly programmed not to harm Omni executives.
Money quote: “What did you think? That you were an ordinary police officer? You’re our product, and we can’t very well have our products turning against us, can we?”
They Live (1988)
In John Carpenter’s iconic sci-fi pic, a blue-collar schlub (Roddy Piper) finds a special pair of sunglasses that allow him to see what’s really going on: that a race of aliens is passing as humans and transmitting subliminal messages telling people to consume and conform. And why are these dastardly extra-terrestrials doing this? To distract us while they pillage the planet’s resources.
Money quote: “They’re free-enterprisers. The Earth is just another developing planet. Their third world.”
Fight Club (1999)
Something of a spiritual sequel to They Live, Fight Club also posits that society conditions us to buy, buy, buy. This realization doesn’t sit well with the unnamed protagonist (Edward Norton), who meets Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), an enigmatic stranger (or is he?) who suggests the only way to feel alive in this consumer hellscape is to punch the crap out of other people (in the spirit of camaraderie, of course). Their fight club soon branches out into anti-capitalist violence, culminating in the epic demolition of several bank towers to the strains of the Pixies’ Where Is My Mind?
Money quote: “The things you own end up owning you.”
Michael Clayton (2007)
This film is a bracing indictment of how far corporations will go to hide their guilt. George Clooney stars as a fixer conscripted to help a law firm representing U-North, the defendant in a multibillion-dollar class-action lawsuit over a pesticide that killed several people. The scene in which two assassins wordlessly dispatch a lawyer who possesses incriminating evidence against U-North is one of the most cold-blooded moments in cinematic history.
Money quote: “Not only is this a great product, it is a superb cancer delivery system.”
WALL-E (2008)
Another anti-commercialist screed, this time dressed up as a winsome Pixar romance between two robots. It’s the 29th century, and rapacious consumerism has made Earth uninhabitable for everyone but our trash-compacting hero, WALL-E. Meanwhile, humans have moved to massive spaceships like the Axiom, operated by the conglomerate Buy N Large, which ensures they spend their days devouring obscene amounts of fast food and trash TV.
Money quote: “A is for Axiom, your home sweet home. B is for Buy N Large, your very best friend.”
Sorry to Bother You (2018)
In this mind-bending satire from director Boots Riley (an avowed communist), a Black everyman named Cassius Green (Lakeith Stanfield) lands a job as a telemarketer and finds his impeccable “white” accent is a ticket to huge sales. A promotion puts him at odds with his unionizing colleagues but brings him in league with the CEO, who reveals that the multi-pronged conglomerate has been breeding a slave labour force of half-humans, half-horses called “Equisapiens.”
Money quote: “Let me give you a tip. You wanna make some money here? Use your white voice.”
How to Blow Up a Pipeline (2022)
A group of idealistic youngsters determines the best way to challenge the hegemony of the fossil fuel industry is to take out some of its infrastructure. Alas, that requires stealth, discretion and an ability to handle explosive materials. This indie thriller’s politics are dead obvious, but the film extracts maximum tension by exploring all the ways such a brazen act of environmentalism could go wrong.
Money quote: “If we want to survive, we must damage and dismantle CO2-emitting devices, demolish them, burn them, blow them up. Let those who profit from mass death know their properties will be trashed.”
