The first third of this film rolls along smoothly. A size reduction technology allows people to become 5 inches tall, with the result that modest wealth in our world becomes vastly multiplied in the miniature world. Before downsizing, people have to have all foreign matter, like tooth fillings, removed. (We find out later what happens if they're not.) Matt Damon and his wife (Kristen Wiig) decide to transform, but his wife, er wiigs out at having all her hair removed and chickens out. Matt gets miniaturized, and how do you get miniature people off the gurney? With a spatula, of course. He comes to and gets a call from his wife when he leans that she's still normal sized. Matt moves into his mini-home, which in his world is a mega-mansion.
And here's where stuff starts getting weird. Suddenly he's living in an apartment building with upstairs neighbors. I must have blinked because I have no idea how that happened. His upstairs neighbor is Christoph Waltz. I'm so used to seeing Waltz in sinister roles I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop. Waltz is indeed a scoundrel, but he never does Damon any dirt.
Repressive regimes, it turns out, find downsizing very handy for getting rid of dissidents. Damon encounters a Vietnamese activist who smuggled herself into America, after being imprisoned and shrunk, and discovers there's a dark underbelly to miniature Utopia, shipping containers turned into mini-slums. Because somebody has to clean the houses and do the dirty work.
Lots of movies have a "Deus ex machina" to steer the plot. This one has a "diabolus ex machina," (devil out of the machine), in this case a massive release of methane in the Antarctic. So do we suddenly have catastrophic warming? No. Mega-storms? No. Catastrophic social upheavals? No. Pandemics? No. We end up at the first tiny-people colony in Norway, which is preparing to take refuge in an underground vault to ride out the extinction-level event. Damon decides to stay outside and go home.
It's awful hard to get excited about an extinction centuries in the future, especially when we're told it's an "actuarial certainty" but nobody has a clue what the actual cause will be. It's far easier to sympathize with Damon's discovery of the mini-underclass. But this film jumbles these themes around and pulls them out at random, like lottery balls.
And here's where stuff starts getting weird. Suddenly he's living in an apartment building with upstairs neighbors. I must have blinked because I have no idea how that happened. His upstairs neighbor is Christoph Waltz. I'm so used to seeing Waltz in sinister roles I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop. Waltz is indeed a scoundrel, but he never does Damon any dirt.
Repressive regimes, it turns out, find downsizing very handy for getting rid of dissidents. Damon encounters a Vietnamese activist who smuggled herself into America, after being imprisoned and shrunk, and discovers there's a dark underbelly to miniature Utopia, shipping containers turned into mini-slums. Because somebody has to clean the houses and do the dirty work.
Lots of movies have a "Deus ex machina" to steer the plot. This one has a "diabolus ex machina," (devil out of the machine), in this case a massive release of methane in the Antarctic. So do we suddenly have catastrophic warming? No. Mega-storms? No. Catastrophic social upheavals? No. Pandemics? No. We end up at the first tiny-people colony in Norway, which is preparing to take refuge in an underground vault to ride out the extinction-level event. Damon decides to stay outside and go home.
It's awful hard to get excited about an extinction centuries in the future, especially when we're told it's an "actuarial certainty" but nobody has a clue what the actual cause will be. It's far easier to sympathize with Damon's discovery of the mini-underclass. But this film jumbles these themes around and pulls them out at random, like lottery balls.