“The Stalking Fields” starts with the narrative of a group of civilians trying to escape for freedom designed in a Black Ops program , which is designed to heal PTSD in the US military. The film takes its time to make sense to the audience, as it seems to be one of the narratives where random civilians are stalked first and then selected for the veteran military to kill them in a dangerous game. The director Ric Maddox debuted with the film, which is conflicting in its nature as it is hard to believe that random people are being selected based on their faults and imperfections to get killed in a game designed for the veterans to heal the trauma that they have experienced in the field. The game sounds meaningless and dangerous and inhumane, even though the soldiers seem to be happy and accepting of their condition to get back to the field to do what they do best, which is to kill. The narrative is also focused on how the government conducts unethical research on its people generally to select candidates for the game and then get themselves killed by the soldiers in the end. In the process, the soldiers are not actually getting properly treated for their trauma, but they are being brought to the fields so that they can reactivate themselves and continue killing civilians and following orders without question. In this chaotic narrative, we find a protagonist who is too damaged to get past his PTSD and gets selected for the Stalking Fields program to heal from both the trauma of the war and everything that came afterwards.
Spoilers Ahead
‘The Stalking Fields’ Story
We, the audience, had to struggle with most parts of the film as it appeared to be nonsensical and ridiculous in the opening act. The Black Ops company is called ArmaCorp, and stalks civilians with police records, bad tendencies, and bad intentions and then selects people from the bunch to be hunted by the veteran SEALs of the American military. The veterans seem to be okay with the program and are responding to it, convincing the government that the idiotic program is working. There seem to be recovered members of the killing team, according to the government, but with the course of the story, we get to know that it is designed to get the veterans to kill without any inhibitions for treating PTSD. The protagonist in the film is living on his own and gets picked up after his wife gets killed in an accident and is observed as a case that is beyond recovery, but (spoiler alert) all he tries to do is to kill the program from within. The narrative is about hunting in an unfair game where people in power get to decide who lives and dies. In the game, the powerful people prey on the powerless and kill them in the name of recovering from a mental disorder. The protagonist, named Woodman, initially seems to be with the team and kills not-so-innocent civilians as a part of the game, but later in the course of the story, we see that he injures the civilians but makes them look dead to keep them alive. The game itself looked disturbing, and the recovered veterans were shown to be having fun killing the civilians. They are brutally murdering the civilians without any question and having fun while doing so, clearly more sadistic than getting proper treatment. The program is designed by an Israeli woman working in association with the US military, who keeps on insisting that veterans kill civilians to their hearts’ content. She threatened the civilians to make them participate in the game by saying that remote-control explosives were planted inside their brains and they would be killed if they did not participate in the game. The protagonist understood the tricks of the game, and on his mission to hunt people down, he would pretend to kill the civilians by telling them the truth. Then he would go on and kill the other members of AmaCorp. The military colonel figures Woodman has gone rogue and asks to abort the mission, but the Israeli lady kills the colonel and continues the mission no matter what. Among the civilians, with time, we get to see the members of AmaCorp at the end who used to be present in the field to make sure that the civilians were on the right hunting path of the veterans.
The Ending: How Did Woodman Rip The Program, Apart?
At the end of the film, when Woodman destroys the facility, we get to see that the plan of the Israeli woman was to rip Woodman from the very beginning and sell her program to the bureaucrats. She had planned Woodman’s wife’s killing and other accidents related to his trauma, which had helped her in demolishing the facility as well. The film ends with the Israeli woman revealing her plan and how she had won over Woodman even though he destroyed the facility.