I didn't buy the vision.

Rating: 5/10 (29 August 2013)

I'm going with my guts on this one since they were turning the entire time when I watched the movie. The universe and the action unfolding within didn't feel right. Great actors like Matt Damon and particularly Jodie Foster did nothing to improve it, but the fault does not lie with them. The problem is the demand for realism in "fantastic" movies. I just didn't buy the vision of the future that the movie presented. The movie's vision of society and technology was clumsily stitched together with a shallow story, and the seems are so visible that it hurts. Let's go over a few examples.
Since the movie clearly wants to be "science faction", I expect consistency. Max is doing manual labor, and it is seen how he is treated with no regards to his humanity. However, if there are robot policemen in the universe who can have conversations with humans, there should be VERY few jobs left for humans to do, because a policeman's job is one of the most complex things imaginable to make a robot do. So unless the government is OK with an inefficient and expensive police force, we must assume that robots in this universe are as good as or better than humans at doing this job. It is blatantly obvious that the robots are only there to convey a message to the audience. The message is again that the government is treating Max like an object because they deal with him through robots. The moderately informed viewer will not buy this inconsistent vision. IT MAKES NO SENSE. Max should be a policeman, and robots should be pushing stuff around. Later, Max is being hunted by humans. The reason for this is that it must be personal. We cannot hate a robot in the same way that we hate humans, and the movie does an excellent job at setting Kruger up as a villain! It ruins the movie when I am painfully aware of these things. The monochrome screens and the stupid messages displayed on them was also a huge annoyance. They should drop those and just have the actor tell us what happened instead of insulting our intelligence.
There should be fixed levels of automation and technology in the universe, and the story must play out according to the rules with such consistency that most people will accept the vision and forget that the universe and the story are not really one. Otherwise it must stop trying to be realistic.
Overall, I cannot recommend this movie to anyone who has a moderate interest in science fiction and has something to compare it to. I don't usually write anything, but I make an exception on this one because I want others to know that this movie is seriously flawed.
Oh yeah, one last thing: The shuttle and the velvet rope... come on.