Review of What Happened to Monday (2017) by Jrossreviews — 07 Oct 2017

JordanRossReviews: WHAT HAPPENED TO MONDAY - 5.2/10.

Rating: NR | Family Friendly: No. 18+ | How to Watch: Netflix.

"Had a lot of potential and a few good moments, but fell on its face tripped by its own mistakes." With such a relevant topicJordanRossReviews: WHAT HAPPENED TO MONDAY - 5.2/10.

Rating: NR | Family Friendly: No. 18+ | How to Watch: Netflix.

"Had a lot of potential and a few good moments, but fell on its face tripped by its own mistakes.".

With such a relevant topic as overpopulation the story of What Happened to Monday had my attention from the beginning. Disappointingly it slowly lost it from there. I really began to get distracted by questions which never seemed to get answered. The film starts with Terrence Settman (Willem Dafoe) – the grandfather – deciding to raise all seven septuplets in a futuristic world where it’s illegal to have siblings. The earth has undergone catastrophic events in the likes of global warming and overpopulation. In an effort to fix these issues the Child Allocation Bureau was created and ran to maintain a one child per family law.

I was immediately impressed by the performance of Noomi Rapace as The Settman Sibilings. Each sibling with her own personality and look played by the same actress cannot be easy to pull off. Noomi’s portrayal of each was believable, but there were times where the most noticeable differences between them was their wardrobe. I enjoyed seeing the personalities of each sister, but it was an inevitability that some would stand out more than others. The writers Max Botkin and Kerry Williamson had me wanting to ask if there was a real reason to have seven siblings other than naming them after the days of the week. Decisions like these that ignored obvious issues is what plagued this film the most.

The moments where the film shined the most were the scenes we saw the relationship between the seven girls and their grandfather Terrence. The lengths that he went to in order to ensure their safety and own self-preservation were admirable and touching. Willem Dafoe brought a strong performance when he could, but another mistake was the under-use of his character in the whole of the plot. However I did appreciate how the extremes of the families’ situation were never underplayed and really showed through the eyes of their grandfather’s role as their mentor. Where this film bombed and really couldn’t come back from was the plethora of plot holes. If it wasn’t for this review being a non-spoiler I could list ten plus moments that had me questioning, is this possible? From technology to just characters simply not noticing the obvious, it felt the writers were simply ignoring these issues and assuming the audience would never notice. The film’s runtime was two hours and three minutes and I would have gladly watched another ten or fifteen minutes of explanations to solve most of these issues. Overall I felt this film had a lot of potential and a few good moments, but fell on its face tripped by its own mistakes. Compared to Tommy Wirkola’s (Director) other works this was a step up, but clearly he has room to improve. The futuristic setting was believable, but the cinematography was nothing to call home about. Acting was good enough to keep you immersed, but the script had obvious issues that removed you from the world. In the end What Happened to Monday satisfied my sci-fi itch but left me scratching my head.