druidistic (spoilers are a real time saver)...Imagine a world, in the not so distant future, where people resemble CGI renderings of the "Team America: World Police" puppets...So lemme get this straight - natural resources dried up and the global economy collapsed as the 3 sentence text intro narrates for us. And yet, they were able to link up a continental metro system and keep it up and running? mmkay.Dandruff shampoo is used to read and manipulate the minds of the masses. Altho the shampoo doesn't eliminate dandruff, it is used by everyone (actually half of everyone), including bald people, ... unconditionally. (What did you think of my conditioner pun?) Maybe that shampoo is their only option because of a future shampoo monopoly. I mean, You can't just not wash your hair in grungy dysfunctional dystopiaville. Or maybe the hot blonde in the brainwashing ad was just too convincing. I don't know, everyone uses the same shampoo, just go with it.And listening in on your thoughts (as provided somehow by shampoo) from the other end is some dude at a desk. There's a one-to-one ratio between people on the shampoo and people being controlled. Half the population controls the other, but hey, they just work there, what else can they do?Look, I understand it's an art form and you gotta take liberties, but c'mon, this is just too dumb to be serious. I dunno, maybe I'm just too left brained for this one.The main character is just a "normal" guy us simpletons in the audience can identify with. Ah, how pleasantly belittling.The music was as empty as the blank expressions on that blonde girl's face.It was so dark I could barely see half the time.Some of the voice acting felt flat, forced, like read from the script. Comparing it to a cheap video game would be a slight exaggeration, but it made me think of such nonetheless.I used to enjoy dystopian movies, but I guess I'm getting burned out. What are they supposed to represent? The evil corporations? The ones that put high fructose corn syrup in everything? Little known fact - the only reason we know about high octane sugar is because they're required to give us an ingredient list.

stoneage22 So. Metropia. Well, I really wanted to like this film. I love science fiction, especially intelligent science fiction, but Metropia does not cut it. I didn't like the flat, one dimensional way they did the CGI, but that's just me. They wanted to try something different and it didn't work for me. However, I didn't find the whole thing visually interesting. The grayish, sepia tones helped establish the mood of the film, but too much of anything can become monotonous. In the first 'Alien' there's an undercurrent of dread, even before anyone dies, but the lighting changes depending on what part of the ship they're in. Even '1984' changes lighting more often! The dialogue is good, but hardly remarkable. The main character didn't evoke much sympathy. He's a bit TOO much of a schlump. Too much of an everyman to be interesting. The voices in his head do a good job of confusing him and the audience. Are they actual voices, or is he slowly losing his mind? However, that too is a bit confusing. And not in a good way. It turns out the corporation, run by an old, crusty, almost decrepit old businessman is in fact monitoring us all. They are feeding us instructions when we stray from the path of conformity and obedience. However, we don't learn to what end. It wasn't clear what they wanted to accomplish. If that was mentioned anywhere in the film, it was not clear. And to me, that's poor storytelling.I rented this on a Friday night, got about 45 minutes in and fell asleep. Never a good sign in a movie. A movie can be slow paced, but there still has to be dramatic tension. Or suspense. This movie did not have it. Of course, I should realize; any movie Vincent Gallo's involved in is going to plod along unbelievably slowly. The premise is good. The average person needing to wake up and not be controlled by corporations or advertising or whatever, is a good idea. I give the movie credit for what it attempts, even though it's been done many times before. However, the execution of this idea was pretty poor. Kind of like when the blonde tries to alert the protagonist to the danger and get him to help her. She tries to seduce him, unfortunately in her underwear instead of completely nude. (And since there was nudity earlier, the movie didn't hold back to be a nice PG film.)If she'd approached him stark naked, he might have found her impossible to resist. She too had a good idea, but it was very poorly executed.

Charles Herold (cherold) I love the look of this movie. It looks like they took photographs, made the heads bigger than the body and the eyes bigger than they should be and animated the result. It is purposely non-fluid and wonderfully conveys a grim, claustrophobic quality. I also thought the basic premise was cool, but I'm going to put in a spoiler section to complain about how little sense it made, ultimately.********* SPOILER SECTION BELOW ************ In the movie, the protagonist hears a voice speaking paranoid thoughts. For example, it tells him his girlfriend might be cheating on him. But he doesn't feel they are his own thoughts. Is he going crazy? It's a cool idea, and it's cool to discover that as a matter of fact he is not going crazy; a corporation has developed a shampoo that allows operatives to use people's brain for communicating and receiving, meaning you can see what is happening in someone's life and comment on it through a microphone that broadcasts into their brain.That's awesome, but here's the problem: why is the guy on the microphone telling the protagonist his girlfriend is cheating on him and other paranoid thoughts? He's not a sadist, so he's not just doing it to be mean. Presumably this is his job. But it appears that the shampoos purpose is actually for mind control, to convince people to buy certain products or vote certain ways, so how is this goal achieved? The filmmakers seem to have liked the idea of someone broadcasting paranoid thoughts into someone else's brain to the point where they didn't care if it made any sense in terms of the story, and that annoyed me. But I still thought it was a cool movie.

Samiam3 Take a trip to Europe in the year 2024. This is a dark age, where the automobile is no longer in use, replaced by a cross country subway system. The most popular product on the market (in fact pretty much the only item) is a shampoo manufactured with a secret mind controlling chemical, which the major corporations use to monitor the public in George Orwell fashion.In an age where animation can do anything, the decision to do almost nothing certainly stands out in film. Metropia is without doubt the bleakest animated feature I know; a murky institutional world, without a drop of color or sunshine, and everywhere we go is under lit. This makes enough sense when taking into account that this is a future where society is low on energy. Not everything however feels credible. The absence of people in great numbers is unusual. The few people who do wander in and out of frame are almost hollow shells. They have no soul, but more importantly they have no movement. Metropia uses the least amount of energy possible to give life to illustrations. To attempt to describe it is not impossible, but it's something that is better off seen for ones self. Metropia is a haunting experience. It's almost a ghost world, not just from the absence of sight, but from the absence of sound. Metropia makes effective use of silence in all the right places, accompanied by an effective, very new age score. As for the storyline, it is familiar, but not painfully so. It's similar to Brazil, which itself is the product of George Orwell's influence. The climax here feels a bit rushed, and easy, leaving Metropia a bit shorter than I think it should've been, but it remains an entertaining experiment.