Product: Office Space (1999)
Rating: 5.0
Kafka, Peter Pan and Flair Oh My!
Are you fed up with the mindless bureaucracy of your workplace? nauseated with the importance of process over results? anxiety ridden because of your job? then Office Space is the movie for you. The setting for Office Space is an Information Technology company that processes transactions for Credit Unions, with a collection of employees that are all either bored, angry, aloof, incompetent, anxious or suffer from one of a hundred other maladies or neurotic manifestations. No doubt this sort of work environment will be familiar to most.It would be convenient to say that this is just another movie about how the corporate work environment drains us of our humanity, but Office Space offers us much more. The mindless bureaucracy, doing work solely to satisfy some inane process (PTS Reports), the sense of detachment from reality is eerily reminiscent of a Kafka novel. Lundberg, the boss, who is completely unaware of what his employees do and how they feel, endlessly repeats his mantra of ok, ok , while his employees become more and more stressed and unfulfilled.Peter, the lead character, undergoes a profound Peter Pan like psychological transformation after which he is no longer motivated to do his job. He comes and goes as he pleases and begins to openly express his true feelings about the job and the environment. His new relaxed attitude impresses the clueless consultants, with their prepackaged prescription for transforming the organization (i.e. reducing headcount), who have been brought in to fine tune the organization.Naturally, no story of this genre would be complete without a love connection between the main character and yet another troubled, trapped soul. Peter's love interest comes by way of a waitress at a nearby restaurant who fights conformity by wearing only the minimum pieces of flair on her uniform. She endures the endless questioning from her manager about why she wears only the minimum pieces of flair, when she is so clearly and simply trying to preserve some part of her humanity.The dam of self-control that held the employees in check finally begins to crack when Peter and two of his co-workers hatch a plot of revenge against the company. Of course their plot like everything else goes badly wrong, but in the end it seems that justice is served.You will laugh out loud, you may cry at times, but if this dark comedy does not send your mind and heart in search of your humanity, sadly you have missed the point.