BEFORE: Guy Pearce carries over again from "Genius". I'm going to finish the Guy Pearce films - plus a whole lot more - before I get to the bigger Nicole Kidman section in November, though I think she's going to show up one more time in September, also. She's really been working, like a lot.
Speaking of working, it's Labor Day weekend, the time when everybody celebrates hard work by taking a long weekend off, which kind of doesn't make any sense, it would be like celebrating Arbor Day by cutting down a forest. I considered flipping this one with "Genius", because then I'd have people working hard on writing and editing books on the holiday itself, but I held back. If that's the best film I've got about people working, then at least it landed on the right weekend.
THE PLOT: In an emotionless utopia, two people fall in love when they regain their feelings from a mysterious disease, causing tensions between them and their society.
AFTER: It turns out people do work hard in the future, so this is a fine film for Labor Day. Really, Labor Day's an easy holiday to program for, because every film character has to have some job, right? Valentine's Day, Mother's Day, Father's Day, those are simple, because everybody falls in love at some point and almost everybody has parents. Try finding appropriate Thanksgiving films, they're a lot harder to come by.
The premise here is that most of the characters work at some kind of information center, and they're documenting, or perhaps falsifying the records, of the war that took place some time before, and how it killed 98% of the world's population or something. I guess it's super important to them that future generations know what went down and how, only they want to set the record non-straight for some reason. Posterity, I guess, or they're all working together to cover something up? There's a bit of a "Brazil" sense to this, because they all work in departments like Historical Narrative Generation or Information Retrieval at this company called Atmos. There's talk of a peninsula somewhere where people still live according to the old ways, but they don't live very long, it's some kind of wild place where everything can kill you, or there's too much radiation or something. This might be a tip of the hat to "Logan's Run", perhaps, some false narrative being spread about the outside world or the Forbidden Zone just to keep people from leaving the complex.
The future humans are (more or less) completely unemotional, their needs are taken care of and they have cool apartments that are only one room, but that room can transform into a kitchen or a bedroom or, one assumes a living room. That's a cool idea, but it's not practical, even in the future, it would take at least a whole room's worth of space just to hold those sliding furniture components somewhere when they're not being used. I guess the future is convenient, but it's just not efficient? This is a city full of human robots, or maybe Vulcans, who just try to stay cold and logical about everything, but hey, at least there's no sexual harassment at work, right? But there are a fair number of suicides, so clearly something's not right - good thing people don't have emotions, because all the people jumping off the roof don't seem to bother them. Hey, that just means more room in the cafeteria, am I right?
Relationships, emotional and physical, are out of the question - this way there's nothing getting in the way of generating all that Fake History. They never really say how the species propagates, but one supposes that it's all done through artificial insemination or are people just grown in a lab? Only some people are starting to display emotional reactions to things, and lead character Silas just had his first nightmare, which is a sign of Switched-On-Syndrome, a multi-stage disease that heralds the development of emotions. He's just got Stage 1, though, thank God it's not Stage 4, because people with Stage 4 are taken to the DEN, the Defective Emotional Neuropathy facility, and are never seen after that. (Again, shades of "Logan's Run" and other futuristic films of our past.)
Silas starts treatments to suppress his emotions, but also notices that Nia, his supervisor, has been trying to hold emotions in. She must be one of those "hiders" who try to deny that they're sick and continue on like nothing's wrong. Silas also joins a support group for people with S.O.S. and learns about people who have Stage 2 or Stage 3, or who also hid the condition for years. The news keeps saying that a cure is "right around the corner", but didn't we hear that about Muscular Dystrophy for, like, three decades? But this is the part of the film that starts to evoke our current pandemic, however the analogies only work properly up to a certain point. Ah, this film got some things right in its view of the future, but got so many other things wrong that I'm afraid to really draw parallels between S.O.S. and COVID. Especially because COVID-19 is a real virus that causes real illness and death, while Switched-On-Syndrome is phony, it's just a return of normal emotions that society as a whole tried to repress with drugs and genetic modification.
But it is true that in this fictional future and our own present there's a lot of misinformation about both diseases, and people aren't sure how to best protect themselves from catching the disease. That alone should make this film stand out, however it's just not going to come as close to our truth as films like "Contagion" or "Outbreak" did, and if you're looking here for COVID-19 references you might as well also turn to "World War Z", "I Am Legend" and "The Happening" while you're at it. In other words, looking for relevance here is a bit of a stretch, especially since they were projecting here maybe 100 years into the future, instead of 5 - this was released in 2015.
What this really feels like is a rip-off of "THX 1138", which was George Lucas's first film, based on a student film he made at USC. That film also depicted a future where drugs were used to control emotions, and sex and reproduction were not permitted, yet two characters off their meds manage to fall in love and devise a plan to escape to the outside world. There are a lot of the same story beats here - no spoilers - and honestly, I'm surprised that the makers of this film didn't hear anything from Lucas's legal team. I mean, yeah, you can't deny the similarities here to "1984", and maybe even a certain Shakespeare play, but even more so, it's essentially a remake of "THX 1138".
I'm not sure how you cast a film where the characters, for the most part, aren't supposed to display emotions. I mean, eventually they do, so I guess you have to start there and find actors who can "switch it off" for the majority of the film. Or maybe you read bad reviews of other movies and find actors who critics called "emotionless" in them, perhaps that explains how Kristen Stewart got the gig?
Even though this film was made relatively cheaply - $16 million budget - it only took in $2 million. Worldwide. Ouch, that stings.
Also starring Nicholas Hoult (last seen in "The Current War: Director's Cut"), Kristen Stewart (last seen in "Bad Reputation"), Jacki Weaver (last seen in "Animal Kingdom"), David Selby (last seen in "Are You Here"), Kate Lyn Sheil (last seen in "Brigsby Bear"), Scott Lawrence (last seen in "Stuber"), Kai Lennox (last seen in "20th Century Women"), Rebecca Hazlewood (last seen in "Lost in London"), Rizwan Manji (last seen in "Morning Glory"), Teo Yoo, Umali Thilakarathna, Aurora Perrineau, Nathan Parker, Toby Huss (last seen in "World's Greatest Dad"), Bel Powley (last seen in "The King of Staten Island"), Tom Stokes, Yu Hwan Park, Mook Denton, Anthony Alex Gilmore, Brett Gillen, Thomas Jay Ryan and the voice of Claudia Kim (last seen in "The Dark Tower").
RATING: 4 out of 10 identity implants
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