Review of Advantageous (2015) by Kj H — 26 Jun 2015

What an amazing piece of art. Just beautiful and touching and painfully possible. I felt a deep sadness at this delicate portrait of our near future where we become both more numerous and less necessary. It is a terrifying future, which Director Jennifer Phang dishes up beautiful, yet haunted, imagery of our slow creeping obsolescence, contrasted with our vulnerability, our need for shelter, food, water, energy, family success, and meaning. It is a world with dwindling resources and few ways to get those needs met--all of us only days away from falling out of the world's graces and onto the cold, unforgiving streets.

What value do we have? How do we get to be the protected elite and not the disposable poor? How do we survive in a world where the individual human doesn't have any value?

This is less of a cautionary tale, and more of a dream portending an inescapable future that is coming into being before our eyes but we can't do anything about it, but try our best to navigate to safety, making the best choices from the options available to us.

It is a beautiful meditation that helps us deal with those feelings of inevitability and anxiety and helplessness lurking in our subconscious. Its well acted, with a beautiful score great pacing and a look and feel that is simultaneously ultra-real and surreal. Underlying everything is a whole host of uncomfortable emotions but Director, Jennifer Phang does her best to allow the emotions to be there without preying upon them or attempting to manipulate us with them, but laying it out before us in a clash of commodity vs. identity, of hope vs. inevitability, of meaninglessness vs. meaning.