This is a little behind, I know. Last week’s episode of Heroes was in many ways completely different from any episode before it. The characters acted differently, the themes discussed were radically altered, and above all it made better use of music than the show has to date. Now, Heroes has music. Or, to put [...]
So, this will in all likeliness be the last Repo! post for a while, unless Anthony Stewart Head descends from the Heavens and commands me to continue writing about it. Hey it could happen. In all seriousness, my comparison of Head to an angelic being isn’t a mistake: He is the guardian angel of this film.
Maybe the problem is that I came in with my hopes too high. The trailer for Repo! is more exciting than some action movies in their entirety (I’m looking at you, Blade Trinity), and its soundtrack is a blood-pumping mix f metal, opera, and rock, with some light techno thrown in for flavor. Listening to the soundtrack is what one imagines Andrew Lloyd Weber would sound like on LSD.
The premise of the film, for those who, unlike me, didn’t spend three weeks trawling the forums for more tidbits on the November 7th release, is that in a dystopian future organ failure has become an epidemic, but slavation comes through the purchase of GeneCo’s replacement organs payed for with flexible finanacing plans. The problem? If you miss a payment, your organs are repossesed by a Repo Man, who usually takes your life in the process of removing the overdue organs. The film was conceived of by the guys who wrote it as a stage play, directed and produced by Darren Lynn Bousmann of Saw 2,3,4 fame, and stars Anthony Stewart Head, Alexa Vega, Paris Hilton, and Paul Sorvino. With all that going for it, what could go wrong?
Well, quite alot actually. The story is set at the beginning of the film by a series of comic panels with musical overlay that makes the viewer feel that he may have stumbled onto some performance art show by mistake. Once the intro is over, we are quickly intorduced to all the major characters, and by quickly I mean within ten minutes. The plot follows that Nathan, the chief Repo Man, has a daughter that inheirited a blood disease from her mother, and so is under effective house arrest. Most of the rest of the movie, therefore, is about her trying to leave the house.
That may sound overly cynical, esepecially given the rather excellent ending scene at the Genetic Opera, but Alexa Vega is what she is cast to be: an angsty teenager. The audience gets reminded of this multiple times, and each successive time feels a little worse. There is a song titled “Seventeen” where Shilo, the character played b Alexa Vega, acts like a punk rocker in front of her father, in what I’m guessing was a calculated attempt to show that 17-year-olds are punks. They could have cut that song and lost nothing.
The plot continues, secrets are revealed, Shilo confronts her Repo Man father as he tries to confront the villainous compnay that employs him (GeneCo) and generally makes life bad for everyone. I will choose to not give away the ending, as it is worth seeing in theaters if for nothing else to see Anthony Stewart Head sing. See it at a student discount of you can.
Since I brought him up, let’s talk about A.S.H. HE IS THE SINGLE GREATEST PIECE OF TALENT IN THIS FILM. Honestly, I don’t think I could have tolerated some of the scenes without him if it hadn’t been for the scenes with him. His character has more depth than the rest of the cast, and he perfectly pulls off the double personality of Repo Man and caring father to Shilo. I also do give props to Terrance Zdunich, who, besides wirting the film and drawing the albeit dicey comic intro, portrays an excellent Graverobber, and I wish there would have been more scenes between him and Anthony Head. It is possible, however, that putting both of them singing in the same scene would have made the rest of the movie look too terrible in comparison, so I understand why they’re normally a few scenes apart.
I feel like responding to some criticism I saw on another site, namely that the camera work is fuzzy and a little, well, terrible. That’s not untrue. I’m not sure why the shots came out looking so bad, but there a definitely points where it seems like the camera was a hari out of focus. I’m not sure why, but it decreases the credibility of the film. Unless they were trying to make an artistic statement the audience was not supposed to get.
That’s in a way the gist of Repo! It feels like a movie designed to polarize the audience that’s watching it, even if that audience came in expecting the second coming. It rolls more as an art piece than as entertainment, more critique on society itself than as something society is supposed to enjoy. Half the people who see it will probably hate it, but they will mask their hate for fear of being mobbed by the die hard fans who loved every grisly second. I fall into the camp of those who were die-hard fans of the movie until they actually saw it.
Review in a paragraph:
Repo! is heavily sexual, gratutitously gory, dark almost to the point of black, and misses some of its potential. Would I watch it again? Yes. In theaters? Maybe. If I’m with other die-hard fans it could be fun, but I would not willingly go to see it again by myself. They should have cut one or two number completely, reshot the entire movie with better cameras, and figured out an intro sequence that doesn’t feel, well, arty. It was a very good movie, not exactly what I was expecting and not a shining light to lead the major studios to making more movies like it, but a good attempt at something unique. All in all, the trailer kind of blew their wad.
In the next-generation world of “I, Robot”, brought to life by filmmaker Alex Proya, the existence of fully-functioning robotic assistants with human intelligence and post-human strength ultimately forces the entirety of the human race to challenge the definitions of “alive” and “human”. These questions are raised through the actions and reactions of the protagonist of [...]
While I would love to do my own reviews about David Louis Edelman’s first two installments of the Jump 225 Trilogy (Infoquake and MultiReal), Charlie Jane Anders at the io9 Blog (a blog to which I owe a huge inspirational debt), has created what is porbably a far better one than I could write. Read it here, then read the books. You’ll be glad you did.
