Alex Garland’s speculative and apolitical action film might be a box office hit but it’s a frustratingly weightless experience

The music video for Mia’s Born Free imagines a ginger genocide, with humvees of jackbooted, gas-masked stormtroopers raiding a high-rise housing complex to round up redheads. Even before the condemned are bussed out to the desert and used for target practice, the camerawork luxuriates in extreme content – needless collateral brutalization, a slow-mo closeup of a man smoking from a glass stem, a harsh coitus interruptus for a nude couple. All the while, a driving synth loop and kinetic cinematography keep things moving at a brisk, exciting clip befitting the high-energy banger at hand; one of the goons mugs through the fourth wall and lip-syncs a “whoo!” in time with the track.

The video has far more use for the edgy textures of state-sponsored violence than its messy realities,...