Review of Downsizing (2017) by Pir — 02 Mar 2018

Unfortunately from a promising start this film devolved into a dull homily on "helping people is what matters". I could see so many promising avenues this could have explored based on the premise of shrinking people to lessen their impact on the environment, and it touches very lightly on a few of them (for example the inherent conflicts between the "smalls" and the "normals", the notion that repressive governments would use the technology in repressive ways, the problems of borders dealing with humans who come in pint size, the obvious issue that even in Leisure Land somebody needs to clean the toilets), but then it wastes time in a drug-induced trance, and loses its way entirely by meandering off into the original small colony in Norway reacting to a potential doomsday scenario that makes absolutely no sense (it does make sense to plan for it in the long run, but there's no reason at all for the darn hurry).

Matt Damon is the most boring protagonist I can ever remember him being in any of his films, and even the always impressive Christoph Waltz and the bright newcomer Hong Chau couldn't pull the unfocused script back from the brink.

I did like how Matt Damon's character came full circle (from taking care of his ailing mother at the start), that's a neat thematic viewpoint, but I really wanted this film to do a lot more with its premise and the big ideas that came with that.

Heck, even just more of the interaction between tiny humans and the regular-sized world would have been more interesting, though that was the most superficial if funny aspect of the film. As usual, science fiction remains best left to actual science fiction writers.