BEFORE: I've got a bunch more Nicole Kidman movies, 7 I think, on the list, but a couple of them seem to fit more in with a Halloween theme, so I'd like to hold off on them if I can. Keeping more of them together for later in a little cluster might come in handy, creating more opportunities to link from that cluster to another cluster of films. I'm going to take this same tactic later in the week with Samuel L. Jackson. This way I can use one of the Kidman films for linking purposes if I have to, but there's no reason to knock them all off now, in fact once I overlaid my chain onto the calendar I realized right away there wouldn't be time enough for that, not if I want to properly celebrate Mothers Day. There are only so many days between now and then, after all.
So, I'm out of Anthony Hopkins movies, and Ed Harris movies for that matter, so for linking I have to rely on an actress who had a very small role in "The Human Stain", Margo Martindale. And from reading the IMDB cast list, it seems her role in tonight's film will be even smaller, if you get my drift. But it counts, and it gets me to the next little cluster of three films with the same actor. Watching another borrowed screener today.
THE PLOT: A social satire in which a man realizes he would have a better life if he were to shrink himself down to five inches tall, allowing him to live in wealth and splendor.
AFTER: OK, so this is a social satire - but a satire of what, exactly? PC culture? Liberalism? Capitalism? It's tough to say. Maybe someone just saw "Ant-Man" and said, "Hmm, I could riff off of that. But instead of making tiny people stronger, I'll just make them normal, and see where it goes." Or maybe it came from one of those thought experiments, like "Would you rather fight a horse-sized duck, or 100 duck-sized horses?" In this case it's "Would you rather be rich for the rest of your life and be 5 inches tall, or continue to be normal-sized and have to work every day for the next 30 years?"
There's just no way this can be taken as a serious sci-fi picture, the science just isn't there to support it. I bet once I start poking holes in this concept, it's going to be like a very leaky life-raft that will soon be sinking into the ocean. The premise here is that some Swedish scientists invent a process that will shrink someone down to miniature size, in order to conserve our planet's resources, since tiny people will consume less, generate less waste, and this will solve all their problems. Tiny communities will be built to house these people in luxurious fashion, since their net worth will also go farther in the tiny world, making them all millionaires.
OK, let's start with the science, and I know this worked in "Ant-Man", with Pym particles, where they tried to solve the problem of "Where does the mass go?" by suggesting that Ant-Man is somehow super-dense when he's tiny, but then of course, that doesn't explain how he can ride an ant, which doesn't have the strength to pick up the mass of a full-sized human. Without that, this film has no answer for where the mass goes - and physics tells us that mass can't be destroyed, only converted into energy. So how does this "downsizing" process remove most of the mass and volume of people, without making them super-dense? And is it some kind of NITPICK POINT that these people who get shrunk down still have voices that are at the same pitch? Wouldn't tiny people have tiny vocal chords and therefore talk in more high-pitched voices, so they'd sound like cartoon characters or people on helium?
Assuming this could all work, which it couldn't, I'm not sure I follow the conversion of one's personal fortune of, let's say $150,000 into $11 or $12 million in the tiny world. The tiny-person community is implied to still be part of the United States (since tiny people still get to vote) so why are they not using U.S. currency? Just because they use less resources, and generate less waste, why is their money suddenly worth more? OK, I can see them getting a tax credit, since they're going to be living in a community that no longer uses public roads, police and fire services, the post office and other government services, but how, exactly, does being smaller convert their money to a higher amount?
The problem here is that the tiny community is not self-sustaining, it relies on protection from the outside world (birds, reptiles and other tiny people-eating predators) and also weather (a small puddle to us would be a flash flood to them) so there must be some costs involved with maintaining the community from the outside. Then there's the cost of this operation, or scientific procedure or whatever, replacing one's dental work, etc. so if anything, becoming small would be a money-LOSING transaction, not the answer to anyone's fiscal problems. And then if the whole tiny-person city has to be run by people outside in the normal world, doesn't that cost money, in regular-sized person dollars? So what's the point of the money conversion, except to make buying in more desirable?
Of course, some people still find ways to make it even more profitable, like buying 1 cigar and turning it into 2,000 tiny cigars and then smuggling those in to the tiny community, and selling them for $1 each. But that still doesn't explain the high money-conversion factor. It's a good start for a film, but about halfway through this film, the story seems to exhaust all the interesting effects of the transition, and then has to strike out in a new, unexpected direction.
Of course, the main character had an expectation of what life was going to be like on the other side, and then finds himself in a very different situation. He's seen living in the giant house (I suppose it's very like a dollhouse) and then circumstances change, and the next time we see him, he's in an apartment with a loud upstairs neighbor. But after meeting this neighbor, and another individual, his life gradually starts to find some sort of purpose again.
What it reminds me of is how people always seem to get in the way of big, life-improving plans. Remember recycling? I'd been reading about it since I was a kid in the 1970's, but it didn't get implemented in big cities like New York until the late 1980's. It was the program that was going to save the planet, and reduce the mountains of trash that were filling up the city dumps - and then after just a few years of curbside recycling, NYC suspended the program because it wasn't "profitable". In other words, they couldn't find a market for the aluminum, plastic and paper products collected that would justify the cost of collecting and separating the trash. Well, the program was never supposed to be profitable, it was supposed to keep the city from running out of landfill space!
Another great example was the "Million Trees" initiative dreamed up by NYC Mayor Bloomberg in 2007, he thought it would be a great idea to have more trees on every city block, making a greener city overall. The intent was good, but nobody did one speck of research about what KIND of trees to plant, and they ended up adding too many MALE trees (yes, there are male and female trees) of flowering varieties that give off pollen, which made things much worse for allergy sufferers living within the city limits. To make matters worse, pollution and global warming means we have more carbon dioxide in our atmosphere, and this triggers trees to produce pollen at three or four times the normal rate. All someone had to do was a little research and figure out to plant only female trees, but nobody did that - so human error screwed up a well-intentioned plan.
Other plans for saving the planet have come and gone over the years, and time after time, factors like people's greed and self-interest have gotten in the way. Remember China's answer to their looming over-population crisis, the "one child per family" rule? This looked great on paper, because it fostered zero-population growth, each couple would be replaced by only one person in the next generation - but nobody factored in the patriarchal nature of their society, and before long parents were (supposedly) abandoning or killing their infant daughters so they could try for a son next time.
So even if this shrunken-person society were possible to create, I have my opinion that sooner or later, people's greed and self-interest would screw it up. Some people would figure out ways to take advantage of the rules, or corner the market on something and get rich off the other people's backs. That's sort of what happens here, as our hero learns that there is another side to the society, there are tiny slums on the outskirts of the tiny city, and a bunch of people who aren't doing so well in the new tiny Utopia. This, of course, leads to a bunch of new questions that the film fails to answer - like, where did these people come from? If they're poor people, how did they afford the shrinking procedure. Or, were they middle-class people at one point, lured into TinyTopia by the promise of the currency conversion, who then found that nothing really changed, that they couldn't succeed in the new society either?
This sort of reminds me of bitcoin, and other crypto-currencies, which seem to exist to solve a problem that wasn't there in the first place. The first few people who got into bitcoin seem to have done really well, like if they bought 1 unit for $100 three years ago, it's now worth a few thousand or something. And I get that trading is secure, the investment always seems to be going up, and it's a sure thing, investment-wise, but I still feel that if I got involved, the next day the Treasury Department would get some law passed that makes crypto-currency illegal and the bottom would fall out of the whole thing. And it would be like my investment into Marvel Comics stock all over again.
But the last part of this film seems to want to deal with the end of the world, because it turns out that shrinking 3% of the human population down didn't solve the problem with the ice caps, and (spoiler alert) we're all going to die anyway, it just becomes a question of when. The main character is then faced with a new dilemma, which manifests itself as a strange echo of the decision he made earlier, to get small. Is he going to join the cult-like tiny colony that wants to seal itself off to ride out the looming extinction event, which symbolically seems to be running away from the problem, or will he continue to live in the real (but now larger) world, and face what's coming?
I guess MAYBE (and I think this is a bit of a stretch, but it's the best I can manage) we're supposed to take away from this film that we all have to make a choice. Are we going to bury our heads in the sand, deny climate change and all the severe weather events we've been having, or start to admit that humanity IS the problem, since Earth clearly hates us and is trying to get rid of us in order to save itself. Whatever we've been doing to recycle, cut down on energy use and trash and not have so damn many kids, we've got to triple our efforts, at the very least. Because people ARE the problem, our own greed and self-interest always gets in the way. So at least if there were fewer people things might start to get better - hey, it's going to happen one way or another, so we should try to make that process as painless as possible. I'm doing my part by not having ANY kids - what are you doing?
Half credit awarded to "Downsizing" for a promising start, but then it just doesn't seem to want to follow through with the idea that it generated.
Also starring Matt Damon (last seen in "Thor: Ragnarok"), Christoph Waltz (last seen in "The Zero Theorem"), Kristen Wiig (last seen in "Masterminds"), Jason Sudeikis (ditto), Hong Chau (last seen in "Inherent Vice"), Udo Kier (last seen in "My Own Private Idaho"), Maribeth Monroe, Rolf Lassgard, Ingjerd Egeberg, Soren Pilmark, Kerri Kenney-Silver (last seen in "Fun Size"), Niecy Nash (last seen in "The Bachelor"), Don Lake, Brigette Lundy-Paine, Joaquim De Almeida (last seen in "Our Brand Is Crisis"), Jayne Houdyshell, Phil Reeves, with cameos from James Van Der Beek (last seen in "Labor Day"), Neil Patrick Harris (last seen in "The Smurfs 2"), Laura Dern (last seen in "Star Wars: The Last Jedi"), and the voice of Mary Kay Place (last seen in "The Hollars").
RATING: 5 out of 10 lab rats
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