The Apocalypse Was Early — Case File 020: Southland Tales (2006)

• Runtime:

  • Theatrical - 2 hours 25 minutes

  • Extended “Cannes Cut” - 2 hours 39 minutes

• Director: Richard Kelly

• Writer: Richard Kelly

• Cast:
  Brace yourself, this list is long and insane.

  • Dwayne Johnson — Boxer Santaros/Jericho Cane

  • Sarah Michelle Gellar — Krysta Kapowski/Krysta Now

  • Seann William Scott — Roland Taverner/Ronald Taverner

  • Justin Timberlake — Private Pilot Abilene

  • Wallace Shawn — Baron Von Westphalen

  • Bai Ling — Serpentine

  • Nora Dunn — Cyndi Pinziki

  • John Larroquette — Vaughn Smallhouse

  • Cheri Oteri — Zora Carmichaels

  • Holmes Osborne — Senator Bobby Frost

  • Miranda Richardson — Nana Mae Frost

  • Mandy Moore — Madeline Frost Santaros

  • Amy Poehler — Veronica Mung/Dream

  • Wood Harris — Dion Element

  • Jon Lovitz — Bart Bookman

  • Beth Grant — Dr. Inga Von Westphalen

  • Zelda Rubinstein — Dr. Katarina Kuntzler

  • Curtis Armstrong — Dr. Soberin Exx

  • Kevin Smith — Simon Theory

  • Janeane Garofalo — General Teena MacArthur

  • Will Sasso — Fortunio Balducci

  • Christopher Lambert — Walter Mung

• Release: Limited Theatrical — November 14, 2007

• How I Watched: Cannes Cut via a friend’s digital media library

• Fun Facts:

  • Southland Tales was originally planned as a nine-part “interactive experience,” with six graphic novels and a website leading into the movie. That plan was later reduced to three graphic novels, with the film serving as chapters four through six.

  • The movie has two official cuts. The theatrical version runs 145 minutes, while the Cannes Cut runs 159 minutes. Arrow’s limited edition Blu-ray included both versions, with a new 2K restoration approved by Richard Kelly and cinematographer Steven Poster.

  • After the disastrous Cannes premiere, Southland Tales went back into the editing room before its theatrical release. Kelly said he cut about 20 minutes, added around 100 visual effects shots, added an animated opener, and had Justin Timberlake rerecord his narration in a deadpan Apocalypse Now mode that changes the film’s tone drastically. The version most people have seen is a vastly reworked compromise.

  • Southland Tales opened in limited release in November 2007, eventually reaching only 63 theaters. For a movie that had spent years building cult-level curiosity through delays, prequel comics, Comic-Con appearances, and a heavy-handed re-cut, its actual theatrical life was barely more than a whisper.

In the three years between announcement and release, Southland Tales occupied the dangerous part of my brain where anticipation starts doing its own marketing. I was a huge Donnie Darko fan, and Richard Kelly getting a big budget sounded like the next logical obsession. I’d already built a shrine to this thing in my head, which is usually the first sign that a movie is about to hurt my feelings. Then Cannes happened, the movie got mauled, the release got delayed and shrunk, and by the time it finally reached theaters, it wasn’t even playing in my city. Nothing humbles anticipation like realizing the movie you’ve been waiting years to see has been released with all the confidence of evidence disposal.

I rented the DVD when it came out, watched it once, absolutely loathed it, and mostly forgot about it. For years, my entire memory of Southland Tales came down to two pieces of shrapnel: Justin Timberlake bleeding through “I’ve got soul but I’m not a soldier,” and Kevin Smith buried under a landfill of makeup. His performance stung quite a bit because I was a huge Kevin Smith fan at the time. I still love him, but back then I was obsessed. Then I started noticing the wildly divided Letterboxd reactions. Plenty of people were trashing it the way I probably would have after that first watch, while just as many seemed ready to defend it, especially the original Cannes Cut. So, still mildly scarred from that first rental with my memory wiped like Boxer Santaros himself, I tossed Southland Tales into the Case File poll. “Let the people decide!” I exclaimed maniacally in my head. “If they will it… I’ll give it another shot.”

I fired up the Cannes Cut, and the case got a lot more complicated. Much to my surprise, the damn thing started opening up. The first 10 minutes felt so different right away. I wasn’t immediately put off like I was with the theatrical cut. The pacing made more sense. The shape became clearer. Some of the extra material gives the world more room to feel like an actual, deranged vision instead of a famous sophomore film crater. There’s still more movie crammed into this thing than it was probably built to hold, but the sheer ambition and chaotic execution are more than worth the price of admission. Serious notes about politics, socioeconomics, faith, addiction, and mental health keep running into wild comedy bits at full speed, and it’s honestly jarring. But the more I sit with it, the more those collisions feel like part of the design: a huge, symbolic, deeply satirical future-parody of a culture sprinting toward its own dumb apocalypse.

This one isn’t going on the slab as a simple disaster anymore. Southland Tales is messy, overloaded, hilarious, strangely moving, and operating with a level of conviction I can’t help but admire. Setting its apocalyptic future in 2008, barely two years after its Cannes premiere, made the movie look ridiculous in the moment; watching it in 2026, the surveillance panic, celebrity politics, corporate control, tech billionaires steering society with world-breaking toys, and national nervous breakdown don’t feel nearly as far-fetched. Rather than sanding down the chaos, the longer cut gives it the context it needed. After nearly twenty years, the reputation has turned into a brawl between people who bounced off it hard and people who swear there’s a great movie hiding in plain sight. Somehow, infuriatingly, I think the true believers are onto something.

Paid subscribers get the full autopsy:

• Symptoms & Diagnosis: the major problems, patterns, and creative injuries that explain how the movie functions.

• Evidence Log: the key scenes and choices entered into the record as proof.

• Pathology Report: the deeper read on why the movie fails, survives, mutates, or becomes more interesting than it should.

• Cause of Death & Verdict: the fatal injury, the official ruling, and what gets entered into the record.

• Plus: vote for next month’s Case File movie!