you can't just go invade a country because you see them as doing something immoral. ~ charles there's something wonky about this film in the way that many of eli roth's films are. here is a filmmaker that shows great intelligence with some interesting, if not unique, things to say and some really interesting visual and narrative techniques to show it but keeps getting dragged down by his tendencies to play to the less effective tropes of the genre he works in. the green inferno exemplifies his tendency to do this and it really muddles up what could have been an excellent film. roth revives "scary tribesman" horror genre to explore his hatred for white entitlement, slacktivism, and the inherent ethnocentrism that comes along with those things. i mean, the tagline for this film is "no good deed goes unpunished". he uses the first half to build ill will towards the central characters, as they prepare and head down to peru to stop a deforestation action by a company and save the tribesmen that live down in that area. clearly, roth argues that the world should not be subjected to the moral platitudes of white, middle to upper class america. he even goes as far as to assert that our efforts to "help", when they aren't just sitting around protesting using hashtags and comfy rallies, really just feed into a sort of white savior complex. that is a very interesting thematic argument to make and explore unfortunately, because of the trappings of the genre and roth's insistence on using homage (to films like cannibal holocaust, roth doesn't infuse any real complexity or sympathy for the tribal people either. he simply doesn't make them into humans, either on the group level or the tribal level. by demonizing both of the groups, the argument here gets muddy and less compelling. he also keeps dragging the film down pacing wise and tempers the viewers engagement with the film by using masturbation jokes and weed subplots that just don't fit in with what is a pretty sophisticated film. even during the more effective gore laden and terrifying scenes, roth demonstrates pretty sophisticated filmmaking. but, he looses that when he keeps coming back to the less sophisticated elements that work much better in other types of horror films, but not this one. overall, there is some really interesting stuff that roth is doing here but it can't overcome the reliance on some elements that belong to other types of films in the genre but not this one. roth is capable of making an absolute masterpiece, even though i don't think he has made one quite yet.