Repo Men

Seen at: Carmike 10, at 1:35 pm today.

This week had been like a taste of early summer. Last night the temperature dropped and the snow rolled in. Smitty called in the late morning. He was having a snow day. I hadn't seen him since we saw Sherlock, so it seemed like a fun idea.

Repo Men just opened today, so in case you haven't seen the trailer, it is set in the near dystopian future, and stars Jude Law who is a repossession agent for a giant biomedical firm that sells artificial organs. When payment falls too far beyond, Law's character (or one of his comrades) is sent to collect the "artiforg." In certain case this results in instant death (for example, with heart repossession).

At one point in this movie, I thus realize that it is about psychopathic serial killers, in the guise of normality. It reminded me of Daybreakers a little, but much more sophisticated, using pure naturalism instead of supernatural.

Some impressive sci-fi in this movie. Original concept right that sheds light on the horror of contemporary society. I was hooked. For example, I was curious to know what it was, about this future society, that would cause so many people to need so many artifical organs? The movie gave a partial explanation, but left open to wandering about more of the back story about this horrible future.

That kind of open-ended wondering is a good thing for a sci-fi movie, in my opinion. It forces you to fill in the details on your own.

Another great thing about this movie was Liev Schreiber, one of the better supporting actors in Hollywood lately. He gets to play the heavy, as the head of the evil corporation, and he does it well.

Unfortunately there is a horrible plot twist in the last part of this movie, one that I saw coming a mile away. It completely changes the theme of the story at the climax, taking it from being a corporate dystopia movie to being a psycho-nihilistic thriller in a way similar to Shutter Island. Yes, it becomes one of those kind of movies, that want you to go back and re-evaluate earlier scenes, like a parlor game.

What an awful disgrace, that the movie had to be marred in this way. There was no reason to do this. The story worked beautifully up to that point.

It was a narrative train wreck at the end, to be sure, but not as bad as the plot malfunction at the end of Daybreakers, which was a more lower-level violation.

Along those lines, in Act Three of Repo Men (spoiler in this paragraph) there is an interesting bit of classical stitching that ties together the two pscyho-realties. In the "fake" reality inside the mind of Law's character, Schreiber gets tasered by Law a second time. Schreiber says sarcastically, as he slumps unconscious, "this again?"

At that instant, I immediately thought of the "variational rule" of movie plots: never twice should we see the same action with the same result (or almost never). That the story violates this rule is actually a signal that the climax of the movie is not "real," but a virtual one inside a character's dreaming mind. This kind of thing really impresses me, when I notice it.

But like I said, this whole twist was a pointless distraction, and even a dismantling of the up-to-then successful biomedical corporate dystopia story. Why wasn't it enough, to tell the dystopian story without the psycho-nihilistic plot twist at the end?

I think the answer to that question is a key to understanding Hollywood and America right now.