The Bad Batch is the second feature film of Iranian-American writer/directer Ana Lily Amirpour, released worldwide in 2017. It stars Suki Waterhouse, Jason Momoa, Giovanni Ribisi, Keanu Reeves and Jim Carrey.
It centers around a young woman sentenced to live in a lawless wasteland somewhere in the southwestern United States for unknown reasons.
Has nothing to do with Star Wars: The Bad Batch.
This film provides examples of:
- An Arm and a Leg: Quite literally. Arlen has one arm and one leg sawed off below the joints by the cannibals shortly after she arrives in the wasteland.
- Artistic License – Law: Miami Man states his crime was being an illegal immigrant, yet later reveals he is Cuban. In the United States, all Cuban immigrants are given immediate amnesty and citizenship. While the film clearly depicts an alternate USA, the revocation of this policy is never hinted at.
- Cannibal Tribe: Miami Man, his family, and various others wandering the wastes.
- Deadly Environment Prison: The prison is not only dangerous because it's full of crazy people (to the point that cannibalism is seen as a normal thing to do inside) but it's just wide-open desert.
- Does This Remind You of Anything?: While we never find out why Arlen in specific got tossed into the prison, a sign at the wasteland's perimeter makes mention that place was set for "undesirables".
- Handicapped Badass: After losing her leg to cannibals shortly after arriving to the wasteland, Arlen escapes her captors and spends the rest of the film walking around with a prosthetic leg.
- I'm a Humanitarian: The Miami Man and his family and friends. They eat Arlen's limbs and later he's shown butchering another young woman like a side of beef and serving her up.
- Noodle Incident: You never learn what caused Arlen to be exiled.
- Penal Colony: The prison in which the whole film takes place is some remote part of the Southwestern desert that is very barely inhabitable and civilized with the only structures lying around being containers and abandoned vehicles.
- Revenge by Proxy: Arlen kills Maria out of anger about her husband and his tribe's cannibalization of two of Arlen's limbs. She immediately feels horrible about it, especially since Maria's daughter witnesses her mother's death.
- Silent Snarker: The Drifter (Jim Carrey's character) is mute (or at least appears to be) but he certainly doesn't needs to say anything to make clear what he thinks.
- Sinister Southwest: The events of the film happen in a Prison Colony for vaguely-defined "undesirables" in the American Southwest desert with a cult leader-style Wasteland Warlord and cannibalism like it was going out of style.
- Wasteland Warlord: The Dream controls the only known non-cannibal settlement in the desert Penal Colony through a combination of manufacturing drugs as currency, rigging the only known working plumbing system, and having lots of armed guards.
