A mishmash of ripoffs and horrible clichés

Rating: 2/10 (21 August 2014)

Okay wow, where to begin? Truly horrible implementation of a great idea, what a waste of great ambition.
It's clear to me that this movie is done by a rookie with too little experience to pull off a monster project like this. It looks like he compensated this with a lot of willpower and a vision most likely written in stone. First I thought that it was the acting that was bad, but thinking about it, it's more likely that it's the awful dialog and lack of acting space limited by the director. It surely doesn't help the case that the guy shouldered both scriptwriter and director and he does this in a project he's been working on for something like 13 years (read that somewhere). I'm just saying that it's probably not that easy to "kill your darlings" at this point and it's pretty clear that this guys likes to micro mange. This is not a good combination. If an actor clearly can't say a line naturally, let him/her try it their way. This is basic stuff.
The biggest reason this movie fails to me is because it's all stolen. Every good filmmaker is allowed to borrow, but this guy steals without shame, everything is just pure rip-offs. For this reason almost every scene looks like it tries to mimic good story telling, as seen in other movies, rather than actually creating something original. Instead he's basically cutting and pasting from other movies to build around his own idea and the amount of different movies you could reference felt almost endless to the point of becoming ridiculous. To make matters worse there are literally hundreds of clichés and naturally this makes it even more stiff and unnatural.
Here's some examples of clichés in no particular order: the future vision, the 70's vision and the presentation of households, the cry-and- scream running after the departing train, the extremely cheesy slow motion name shouting, the tattooed future-man (but with a slight lisp, original but surely coincidental), the classic over-the-top TV host with a pet pig (come on - really?). The sad montage with holding and scrubbing in the shower, the usual "chasing-each-other-around-because- we're-so-in-love" crap and I thinks he probably used all possible love scenes that is out there and crammed them all into this one. The classic "under-the-blanket"-"love-you-forever-dialog" is of course not left out. Stay with me here, I'm just scraping the surface: ...The train station time lapse, the overly dramatic voice over accompanied by a type writer. Last but surely not least the oh so totally predictable soundtrack consisting of everything from opera to Pixies, probably a dozen of pop songs(this is cheating and everybody knows it) and on top of that various oldies for that retro feeling that always works. I'm not saying it horrible, the music is awesome, it's just that it's used in a way that's without finesse.
The end result is sadly a poorly cut drama that is sprawling everywhere without any constancy - both visually and dramaturgical. I'm not even focusing on the really bad stuff like the old mans make up, his fake laugh, the fake tears, the mediocre greenscreen scenes and special effects. There is also a lot of little details that someone really should've looked at, like the guy with Downs disease who growled and attacked. Wtf.