André Luiz Oliveira’s Meteorango Kid: Intergalactic Hero follows a disenchanted teenager from the northeastern Brazilian state of Bahia named Lula amidst the political turmoil of the late 1960s. As Lula wanders from one location to another, he frequently slips into vibrant fantasies where he envisions himself as famous characters like Tarzan and Batman. Scenes that would normally carry considerable weight as moments of narrative progression or character development, such as a meeting with a film producer and his birthday party, are swiftly lost in a wash of cacophonous pop music, bizarre images (the first shot of the film consists of reversed footage of Lula being crucified on a palm tree), and other forms of mass media detritus. If other films from the Brazilian Udigrudi movement like Rogério Sganzerla's The Red Light Bandit (1968) used the pretense of a cinematic narrative to make a statement on the cinema, then Meteorango Kid: Intergalactic Hero used a similar strategy to examine Brazilian society, or at the very least, a small portion of it.
7/10
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