Dystopia to Utopia and back...

Rating: Null/10 (13 September 2019)

Brilliant and awful all at once. Some of the most beautiful and inspiring visuals in a movie and some of the most crass character arcs ever. Abusive exploitation of the kiddie factor... any child in the movie was predictably imperilled and miraculously healed, incidentally along with the whole of the planet, but not for one moment did anyone appear to be having a tough time on the way to the miracle.
The whole movie is targetted so viscerally it numbs.. a kind of cinematic chemo-therapy. The volence is ultra-violent, the poverty is ubiquitously third world and the wealth is the ultimate gated community chic.
It is the middle that gives perspective... the middle ground that shows whether life is good or bad, flipping from extreme to extreme leaves an empty centre that makes what could have been a poignant, hard hitting message look like scrawled handwriting on an empty golden envelope.
Unsatisfying though it is i still enjoyed it on other levels... mostly looking for the cracks in the veneer and the peeling paint of the gloss. The actors all do well, but you can't save a poor script with good acting.