BEFORE: Another future tale of medicine/science gone wrong? This time the subject is organ reposession. Linking from last night, Bruce Willis was in "The Bonfire of the Vanities" with Tom Hanks, who was in "Road to Perdition" with Jude Law (last seen in "Closer").
THE PLOT: Set in the near future when artificial organs can be bought on credit, it revolves around a repo man who struggles to make the payments on a heart he has purchased. He must therefore go on the run before said ticker is repossessed.
AFTER: Most science-fiction ends up revealing more about the year in which it's produced, rather than the year in which it's set. Replace Klingons, Romulans and Vulcans with Russians, Chinese and Japanese, and you learn a lot about the geopolitical culture of the 1960's that produced the original "Star Trek" series.
This is the kind of science-fiction that 2010 headlines produce - this film takes its cues from the bad economy, the mortgage crisis, the growing gap between rich and poor, the overall decline in Americans' health, and the debate between healthcare reform vs. socialized medicine. Throw in some advanced technology, and you can extrapolate a future in which artificial organ replacement is readily available, but expensive.
Or perhaps some screenwriter just got a notice from a collection agency after some unpaid doctor bills. Imagine the conversation - "What are you going to do, take BACK my surgery? Wait a second, that's a great idea!" - ironically, leading him to sell a screenplay and pay his bill.
Such postulation leads to the concept of organ payment plans (at 19% interest!) and also repo men who take back organs when the bills are past due - and that's as brutal as it sounds. It's like that scene in "Monty Python's Meaning of Life" when the organ collectors come to the door - only set in a dystopian corporate future similar to the one seen in "Brazil". Hmm, I wonder if F.T.O.B. Terry Gilliam has a lawsuit pending against this film - must check later.
Jude Law's character is one of the best repo men - until he has an accident, becomes an "artiforg" recipient himself, and finds he (quite literally) no longer has the heart for such work. And so he falls behind on the payments - what, no corporate discount?
I'm pretty squeamish when it comes to gore - and this film has some of the most graphic surgery, and violent combat scenes that I've encountered. When I was a kid I thought I might like to be a veterinarian, but came to change my mind when I realized that would involve slicing into animals. Maybe some people can do it, but not me - I have great respect for doctors and surgeons. And maybe I'm in the minority here, but it's not my idea of entertainment - parts of this were almost like surgery porn.
Fortunately, I'm an adult now, and I know that what's on screen is all done with special effects (I hope...) and I acknowledge it's just a movie, and a clever one at that. I was almost seduced by the film's ending into giving it a higher rating - but then I realized that any attempt at a message or allegory (they came close, something about meeting one's failing health with dignity rather than prolonging life with extensive technological means) was hopelessly buried under an orgy of violence and a mountain of pessimism.
I feel really lucky to be 42 years old, and to have never spent a night in a hospital - every illness or surgery I've had has been either handled out-patient or done in the E.R. - but if this is what the future of medicine looks like, then as The Who sang - I hope I die before I get old. But I'd like to think that medical science would develop alternatives - like cloning organs, or using ones from other animals - before the events depicted in this film come to pass.
Hmmm, there are actually a fair amount of plotholes, some of which I didn't consider - like how the corporation has the ability to scan for artiforgs, but not track them long-range (what, no GPS in the future?). Also, it would make much more sense to switch off the overdue artiforgs rather than track down the people and cut them open - was this some kind of ill-intentioned futuristic legal compromise? Anyway, I didn't notice those plotholes during the film, so the ruling stands.
Also starring Forest Whitaker (last seen in "Phenomenon"), Liev Schreiber (last seen in "The Sum of All Fears"), Carice Van Houten (last seen in "Valkyrie"), Alice Braga (last seen in "I Am Legend"), with cameos from RZA (last seen in "Derailed"), Yvette Nicole Brown (last seen in "(500) Days of Summer"),
RATING: 6 out of 10 scalpels
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