Middle class children face a conformist social order

Rating: 3/10 (25 July 2014)

I had some hope for this movie until perhaps 20 minutes in. While I wouldn't disregard the possibilities inherent in even a fairly derivative rendering of the post-apocalyptic World Order made tolerable by an instituting of castes -- based upon an amalgam of Platonic categories and the societal reductionism of a Brave New World ethos -- I was quickly dismayed, even put off, by the conventionalist attitudes and cultural inhibitions of the characters as such. One is supposedly to be disturbed, perhaps traumatized, by the expectation that defecation is to be consummated in an open bay of toilets; the "mess hall" scene that follows, while suggestive only of the utilitarian efficiency of an industrial, prison-like dining facility, is rendered trivial and basely comic by a dual commentary upon the ingesting of "hamburger", followed by an absurd and pseudo-intellectual analysis of the food in question. Never having suffered the indignities of Boot Camp in any branch of the military; terrified of exposing their bowel movements to one another in a jail cell; reviled at the prospect of eating lousy fast food -- the privileged participants in this plastic vision of a possible future fail at the outset with their pedestrian and Bourgeois lack of vital capacity or open-mindedness.