Downsizing

When we heard Alexander Payne is bucketing his hands into science fiction, every bone in fans and non-fans were excited! But, was the same effect sustained after watching it though?

Downsizing has an A class high concept! It's easily among the tops ever put to film! Such intriguing stature of notion is rare! The show opened with a visual experiment revolving lab mice taking place, followed by an exclamation of joy and achievement by a Norwegian scientist. Panning down 5 years later, we see he's shrunk to a miniature size in a shocking and impactful reveal, announcing this as the future to solve overpopulation crisis on planet Earth. We also get a taste of how this will have a ripple effect on mankind's future, as a sample set of 36 shrunken people was shown.

While the initial scene may seemed expositional, it actually served 2 crucial functions. One is of course, to stage up the universe that we're currently watching. More importantly, to put us - the audiences into the shoes of our protagonist and the people who're about to go through this Downsizing process later on. After the title card's slammed, we're introduced to a regular occupational therapist named Paul Safranek (Matt Damon). He loves to help and ease physical pain. 10 years later, he's married and has financial problems. Stumbling in midst of this, he sees a fellow high school colleague who's joined the small people community, laying out the financial freedom and benefits one'll get by doing so. His visit to Leisureland was heavily persuasive too! Slowly and gradually, through Paul and his life scenarios, we are also pulled into submitting ourselves to be shrunken!

See, writer duo Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor didn't just create a concept only to leave it vague. So much of thorough, precise and painstaking details plus thoughts went into this project that were absolutely mesmerizing! Currency conversion, raindrops filtration, dead cells hair and artificial body parts removal were examples! Keepsake box became a lorry's storage! Rings and dragonflies were humongous! As they walk you through the process of mass reduction step-by-step, it's so freaking exciting! The constant feeling of something bad is about to happen lingered, as none of us have done this before! Two and a half years' worth of research failed nobody!

Tragedy hits our hero as he learns his wife chose to not undergo the process, only after he has gone it through himself. It's irreversible! Scary! Sad! But here's the thing about the filmmaker. He maintained an offbeat yet uniform tone for the overall picture. Neither it's too serious nor too comical. So, post this harrowing event, where's the story gonna go, one wonders?! Apparently, nowhere.

We've arrived to the part that would break many hearts. Audiences who were extremely riveted from the beginning will face colossal disappointment, as the story doesn't travel anywhere beyond this point. It is as if the writers had no clue how to steer this storyline forward anymore upon shrinking our protagonist. Downsizing became a totally different movie from what we're watching an hour ago. Sure, the title could actually refer to the Main Character, a reflective portrayal of most human beings here, learns how to downsize his own needs and desires, quits being selfish by taking actions for the sake of himself and lives for others finally. But, the high concept established earlier in the film is a monster with big appetite! It's large and noticeable! Feeding it with a teeny-weeny post-Midpoint narration that has little to no connective tissues hinging on it was a suicide call! There are multitude paths the script could have explored on, but the most unrelated, directionless and dull one was picked!

New characters like Dušan Mirković and Ngoc Lan Tran were roped in as supporting characters. While Christoph Waltz and Hong Chau gave good performances as the respective roles, how were they relevant and suddenly significant to this story? What were their contributions? Sure, the latter was the Impact Character, but what do we even care about the TV box incident? What was given to us in terms of emotions, content and meat that will make us care about it at all? Why was it necessary in the first place? Apart from her "What kinda fuck did you give me?" moment which was legendarily funny, the rest were sheer nonsenses. A random lady appeared out of nowhere in the original community to provide scientific mumbo jumbo with no reasons whatsoever. How could something that started out extremely phenomenal, plummet into a pile of horseshit as such?

However, through these personas, many topics such as environmental pollutions, extinction and comfort zones were tackled, despite lack of any depth. It's also really nice to see a multicultural melting pot onscreen. No matter where humans go, corruption and capitalism will follow, dragging along poverty with it. As the last collection of humans stare at the sun for the last time, we share the pain and could only wish such a thing would never happen in our remaining lifetime.