Downsizing (Alexander Payne, 2017) Matt Damon, Christoph Waltz, Hong Chau, Kristen Wiig, Udo Kier; social satire in which a man realizes he would have a better life if he were to shrink himself to five inches tall, allowing him to live in wealth and splendor
I was really surprised by this. I was expecting a scifi movie which dealt seriously with the technology that it proposes could exist. But instead it's what I call a 'social problem' film, which uses science fiction to set up a discussion about ethical and environmental issues
Matt Damon does very little, as usual. Nice to see Udo Kier turn up - except that you keep expecting something deviant to happen; the presence of Christoph Waltz's libertarian contributes to this.
A.O. Scott:
Surveying a landscape of impending ecological catastrophe, it proposes a future that is only mildly dystopian and prescribes laughter rather than apocalyptic despair as, if not exactly a remedy, then at least an acceptable palliative. We don’t need to disappear altogether, but it might be better all around if we weren’t so darn big. ... the movie resembles an episode of The Twilight Zone directed by Preston Sturges. ... Did we come all this way to rediscover the ouroboros of guilty liberal self-consciousness? ... an ambitious movie about the value of modesty, and its faults are proportionate to its insights. A.O. Scott, NYT.
Henry K. Miller:
While Downsizing is not not about the end of human life on earth, it confronts the prospect with minimal sentiment, and uses it to ask questions about what the good life might consist of, here and now. Its critique of overconsumption is aesthetic, or philosophical, but not especially ‘green’; though it abhors greed and selfishness, it is unashamedly individualistic. Henry K. Miller, Sight & Sound.
Garry Gillard | reviews | New: 14 August, 2018 | Now: 23 August, 2022