mind drilling

Rating: Null/10 (24 December 2009)

I'm convinced that no genre is more connected to the reality of our lives than science fiction. The levels of visual and contextual abstraction demanded by the genre are so high that you can only do good science fiction if you root its essence on what we are, outside the life of the film. You take out the comfort of recognizing places (most of the times), of understanding moods, contexts, ways to live. But you're still left with people, or beings that stand for people (planet of apes) or better still, moodiness, and context that suggest people's state of being. That's our link, that's our portal to any interesting sci fi built world. Méliès. 2001. Blade Runner. Now this. It is a great addition to the filmography of 2009, and eventually the greatest achievement in sci fi of this finishing decade.
This is a sort of 2001 meets Blade Runner, two threads of science fiction which i hadn't seen mixed ever, and doubted it could be done. It's better than that. It doesn't mix. It just makes you believe it mixes. The film deceives you all the way, puts you in the same sort of unawareness Sam Bell is supposed to feel. So the film is what it is telling.
1 - This is where we start; Minimalistic, 2001 based imagery of the space. Open spaces, emptiness, isolation, meditation. That's the starting ground. the man and the machine (Sam and GERTY). We're led into believing we'll watch the battle for control, who wins, who's in charge? who deceives who?. What is the machine hiding, Is it hiding anything? The power over narrative control of the story, that's what it is.
2 - But than, we're included Sam's doubles in the story. True or false? are We being deceived? Are the doubles real or a product of Sam's imagination? Is any of what we see any real depiction of what's going on, or are we left already into the delusional imagination of a homesick isolated man?
3 - the unfolding of the previous point. Yes, the doubles are real, physically real, at least everything indicates so. So, if every clone is Sam Bell, if every clone has the same past, who is Sam Bell? Who is any of those human beings, who can share among them the same emotions, the same feelings, the same remembrances. Here it invades completely Dick/Blade Runner territory. replicants. here we have the reversed story of Blade Runner, the world according to the replicants. Not a dubious depiction of whether Harrison Ford was a replicant himself, instead a hard exploration of what being one means. Invented memory, stuffed emotions. And all that those things mean to us, as human beings.
All the visual work has a coherence to what is being told. There is not a visual reference that outdoes the others, and that's actually a good thing. We may have a great new filmmaker here. We certainly have a worthy film here.
My opinion: 4/5
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