*WARNING: CONTAINS SPOILERS*
Earlier this week, my boyfriend and I ventured out to the local movie theater to take in James Franco and Seth Rogen's new movie, "Sausage Party." Trailers for the movie have been released for quite some time now depicting it as a whimsical yet very much adult animated comedy about talking food finding out what happens to them after they are purchased at the grocery store.
Naturally, neither of us expected much from the movie other than a few jokes about male genitalia and some sexual tension between hotdogs and buns.
In actuality though, the movie is a thinly-veiled attack on religion.
The movie opens with the grocery store's inhabitants singing a lovely song about their "Gods" (humans) who will buy them from the store and take them to "The Great Beyond" (Heaven) where everything is perfect. During the song (which they sing every morning before the store opens– a reference to church), different isles put their own spins on the verses like the German food isle which exclaims that the Gods want them to "kill all the Juice."
Other aspects of the Christian religion are brought into question like staying a virgin until marriage. The hotdogs for instance want to be inside the buns but know they have to stay "fresh in their containers" until purchased and taken to "The Great Beyond by the Gods. They know if they're no longer fresh, they will be thrown away by the Store Clerk (i.e. sentenced to Hell).
As the movie progresses, the main characters, a hotdog named "Frank" and a bun named "Brenda" who are dating and struggling to remain pure until they're "chosen" run into a Jewish bagel and a Muslim lavash (a type of middle eastern bread) who hate each other initially based on their "religious" differences but wind up being friends despite it all and a lesbian taco who fights her feelings for Brenda because the "Gods" wouldn't approve.
At the end of the movie, of course, the foods find out that they are eaten in "The Great Beyond" and that the "Imperishable Foods" (Firewater, Twinkie, and Mr. Grits) made up "The Great Beyond" because they were tired of the terror and chaos that ensued every morning when the store was opened.
While Frank obtained proof that the "Gods" were "evil" in the form of a cook book, the foods still decided that they'd rather believe in the lie than face the truth.
At the end of the movie, the food bands together to kill all the humans and then they all have an orgy because, you know, James Franco and Seth Rogen.
The movie, in a weird way, really makes you think about religion and its purpose in society. It's scary how religion is manipulated and used to turn groups of people against one another.
While I was raised in a Christian household and maintain my own religious beliefs, I wasn't offended by the movie and thought that the message was actually quite expertly delivered. "Sausage Party" may not have been the thoughtless, vulgar comedy that I was expecting but it did inspire some thought provoking conversations between movie goers after the feature. All in all, I'd recommend it. 9/10 only because I could've done without the grotesque images of people being brutally murdered in the end. Although I suppose for the rest of the movie, I did watch food get brutally murdered so maybe that was another inspired move on Franco and Rogen's parts to get us thinking about our place in the universe.
