I viewed this picture as a Netflix download on my flight back from Phoenix on October 28th. As sucker for dystopian sci-fi films, I tok a chance on this title after watching the trailer. The film is directed by Norwegian Tommy Wirkola with a cast consisting of Noomi Rapace, Glenn Close and Willem Dafoe.
The film is set in the not too distant dystopian future where the world stands along the edge of a knife, as usual. The world is overcrowded and food is scarce. In order to deal with this problem the government puts in place the Child Allocation Bureau headed by Nicolette Cayman (Close). With sweeping law enforcement powers the CAB makes sure that families have only one child and one child only. Any siblings caught are put into "cryogenic freeze" until all the problems can be fixed.
Enter the Settman family. Karen Settman gives birth to identical septuplet sisters in and dies during birth. The grandfather, Terrence (Dafoe), takes custody (the father's whereabouts are never mentioned) and names each child after a day of the week (so you can see where the plot goes). Terrence trains the girls to live in each other's particular day and to act as one personality in public. The training is brutal but necessary in order for them all to survive. They collectively take the identity of Karen Settman.
We fast forward to the women living together, with very distinct individual personalities but managed to get a successful career in banking. Then one day, Monday doesn't come home and the sisters need to figure what happened and also try to find their sister. Things go from bad to worse as the sisters pick up more knowledge about Monday's movements. The CAB eventually gets on to the sisters and sends hit teams after them. Without giving too much away, the CAB is surprisingly up to no good, Monday may not have been the goody-goody sister she appeared to be, Cayman has plans to tighten her grip on the CAB and the lid gets blown off their society.
The film received a 58% Rotten Tomatoes rating, which is not awful but not that good, and it's well deserved. To me the plot borrowed too heavily from films like The Matrix, Children of Men, Minority Report, V for Vendetta, Soylent Green and a bit of Run Lola Run to name a few. It just seemed like there was not a lot originality in the plot. The film was well acted and the action sequences, though derivative at times, were good. This film fails as a sci-fi but is an ok action film.
The message of the film is a bit hard to grasp, for me anyway. Is it a shot at China's One-Child Policy that ran from 1979-2015, which would be weird considering how much the film industry relies on China as a market? To me it seemed to simultaneously take shots at both the pro-life and pro-choice side. Perhaps, it's just another film about a dystopia run by an oppressive regime. Anyway, the film is just not that good.
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