Product: Office Space (1999)
Rating: 5.0
If Dilbert were a movie ...
Office Space highlights the absurdities of the modern day workplace, and the high tech workplace specifically. Everyone at computer software company "Initech" hates their jobs, especially Peter Gibbons (Ron Livingston) who feels trapped in a treadmill of nonrewarding monotonous work as he rewrites and tests other people's software to insure it is Y2K compliant. Simultaneously, he feels equally trapped in a relationship with a woman who treats him like an unsatisfactory employee. Peter represents all of the 25-35 year old white collar workers who know they are not doing what they want to with their lives but simply find initiating a complete career change as too scary, as if anything could be worse than what they are putting up with already.I'm positive that someone involved with this movie has a deep understanding of working in software, because I easily recognized each of the various types of people represented in the cast - even the psychotic coworker, Milton, who keeps coming to work when they move his desk to the basement and stop paying him. Gary Cole's performance of Bill Lundburg hits the bullseye as the boss that understates in a calm voice everything that he wants, but then has no problem firing people if they don't meet his understated demands. What seems like a post-it note is actually a subpoena, in Lundburg's eyes. One of my favorite scenes is when he is having everyone come in and basically beg for their jobs by justifying their positions. One older worker only seems to have one function - to carry the requirements from the requirements writers to the software engineers. When the bosses try to probe more deeply into his skills he gets angry and bellows "Are you blind! Can't you people see I have valuable people skills!".Ultimately, Peter and his coworkers bungle a scheme to embezzle from the company by writing a program that extracts fractions of pennies per iteration. Instead of producing many very small checks, the program winds up producing one huge check that is bound to attract attention. Thus Peter goes to Initech to return the check. His return of the money coincides with psychotic coworker Milton finally making good on his mumblings of "burn down the building". The end result is that, with no Initech to return to, Peter takes a job in construction and realizes he enjoys working outside and with his hands and is thus finally happy in his work. As for Milton, in spite of being without a paycheck for weeks, he seems to mysteriously have found the money to have taken up residence in a tropical resort.