BEFORE: I've got 6 films in total on the docket with Willem Dafoe (carrying over from "Streets of Fire"), so I can watch them in almost whatever order I want, except for the last one, of course. Some of these probably have a LOT of Dafoe in them, while some might just have a little, like just his voice. That all counts, it's all good, and it enables me to think somewhat thematically, if I want to. And I can program this film with "Monday" in the title for a Monday review, because why not?
Back to Netflix for this one - crossing off "Documentary Now!" series from my Netflix list, too, so that list is slowly getting smaller. If I can stay awake for a comedy special here and there after my movies, then the process will go even faster.
THE PLOT: In a world here families are limited to one child due to overpopulation, a set of identical septuplets must avoid being put to sleep by the government and dangerous infighting while investigating the disappearance of one of their own.
AFTER: Twins are weird, can we all agree on that? Heck, I even know some twins who say that being a twin is weird, looking across the room at someone who looks just like you, only maybe has different hair or a cut over their eye. Then being a triplet must be even weirder, and so on from there. But some actors must love to play twins or triplets, because they get a chance to give subtlely different performances, or do one of those things where they get to play the evil twin pretending to be the good twin, or like in "Mission: Impossible" when they do that stuff with the false faces, so an actor has to play THIS guy a little differently, because he's really THAT guy wearing a mask. (see also "Legend", "The Spiderwick Chronicles", "Annihilation", "The Stepford Wives" and so on...)
But SEVEN characters in the same film? You've got to go back to mid-90's Eddie Murphy or Michael Keaton in "Multiplicity" to find similar achievements - or as far back as Alec Guinness in "Kind Hearts and Coronets". Plus, the characters here are "identical" septuplets, only they're not, there are subtle variations in their looks and personalities - I suppose it's debatable whether that came from what day of the week they're each named for, like that "Monday's Child" nursery rhyme, or if there are other forces at play here. Like, what do you have to do to stand out, distinguish yourself from the pack, if you have 6 identical siblings? You might take to wearing your hair differently, or making it a different color, or taking up a hobby that the others aren't interested in.
The problems is that these 7 sisters live in a future world that prohibits siblings, because the planet is extremely over-populated and resources like food and water are so scarce. This could be a riff on China's "one child per family" policies from the past, or an extrapolation of other plans for zero population growth, most of which have been voluntary so far. I know I'm doing my part, by not reproducing - you're welcome. But in this future scenario, any children born beyond the limit of one are put in cryosleep stasis, until such time as there are fewer people or more resources to sustain them. Funny thing, though, nobody seems to be working on a way to increase resources or decrease the population beyond this, no there's no exact timeline for unfreezing the excess people.
So, for decades nobody has a sibling, or if they do, the siblings get taken away from the general population and essentially put in a cage (hmm, I wonder if this is a commentary on recent political events involving immigrant children...) and frozen, so it's out of sight, out of mind. Don't worry, the best government minds came up with this solution, so apparently nobody raises too much of a fuss, and they go about their business. After all, there's so much to do, now that there are long lines to stand in just to buy a rat for dinner and other lines to stand in to have your bracelet scanned just to prove for the 10th time today that you're an only child.
But any technology that society relies on can be tampered with, like Terrence Settman figures out how to give his 7 granddaughters identical bracelets, so they'll all scan as an 8th person, the fictional Karen Settman. And each girl gets to leave the house on one day each week, so that naturally anyone who sees her will assume she's the same girl they saw yesterday. What could possibly go wrong? As long as the girls have a debriefing session at the end of every day, and commit the things that happened to their composite identity to memory.
(I used to pull a similar scam when I was on the math team in high school. Sometimes when we went to another school for a tournament, we had enough people for a varsity, or "A" team, and also a JV, or "B" team. But sometimes we were one person short, and since each person had to compete in 3 out of the 5 rounds, all we had to do was come up with a new, fictional identity, and three different people would go into the round, during their off-rounds, and put the false name on top of their sheets. Just a little planning and it all worked out - nobody ever compared the handwriting on the sheets, or checked to see if all of the names of the competitors were genuine students at our school. I even got it to a point where if we were 2 people short, the "B" team could still compete, but it took more careful planning, and we had to remind everyone when they were going in to a round under a false name. Thankfully, since this was just an academic sport, nobody ever cared enough to bust us.).
But a problem arises when the girls are adults, and collectively holding down a job at a bank, and vying for a promotion. One night Monday doesn't come home, so what happened? Did she meet with an accident, was she mugged, beaten or murdered? Did someone else vying for the promotion take her out of the picture, or did the government somehow get wise to their decades-long deception? The only thing they can do is send Tuesday back to work the next day, as scheduled, and have her try to trace Monday's steps, but then how does one inquire with co-workers by asking, "Umm, what did I do yesterday?" as if she can't remember?
It's a fascinating conundrum, and once the sisters learn what's really going on, it becomes quite action-packed. But any and all NITPICK POINTS tonight have to do with the premise - assuming the government could mandate how many children a couple could or couldn't have, why wait and take care of any rule-breaking after the fact? Then there's the whole system with the bracelets, creating an enormous database of everyone who's alive - why not implement some kind of forced sterilization, wouldn't that be easier? Temporary or permanent, or perhaps temporary and than any violators would be forced to undergo permanent sterilization, this tactic seems more direct and more easily enforced. Rounding up all the siblings years after they're born seems a bit like closing the barn door after the horse has left the stable, the damage is already done.
And then what about adoptions? Could a family have more than one child if one was born genetically and the other was adopted later? What about blended families, or people who have more than one relationship during the course of their lives? If they had a child with their last partner, would they be forbidden from having one with their next partner? What if their current child dies, could a couple have a new one? Logistically, who's going to parse out all these rules and then convince all the Earthlings in all the different countries to get on board? It's a bit like climate change, some countries can take steps to reduce pollution and emissions, but that's not going to mean much if there are countries in other parts of the world who keep denying the need for this, if some people still think coal and fossil fuels are a good idea, when we've got the cleanest source of energy bombarding us with light and heat, most of which is going to waste. If we could just designate some area the size of Rhode Island, maybe in the middle of the Sahara, and fill that with solar panels, wouldn't we have all the energy we need, and then some?
Oh, wait, I do have one other NITPICK POINT - if you put a bunch of aerosol cans into a microwave, and you set it for a minute, trying to create a bomb, it's not necessarily going to explode when the timer hits zero, it's going to explode when it's ready to explode. Perhaps it's just a coincidence, but that seems too convenient.
Also starring Noomi Rapace (last seen in "Bright"), Glenn Close (last seen in "The Stepford Wives"), Clara Read, Marwan Kenzari (last seen in "The Mummy"), Christian Rubeck (last seen in "Allied"), Pal Sverre Hagen, Tomiwa Edun, Cassie Clare and a cameo from Robert Wagner (last seen in "Harper").
RATING: 6 out of 10 fingerprint scanners
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