Dystopian ideas are great. When watching the trailer to this film, I could detect themes like escaping reality through hallucinogenic drugs, celebrity image and the obsession to stay young and thirdly, the ability to attain complete freedom. Sadly, all these great ideas and thought provoking themes turn out to be anything but great or thought provoking. Instead we are presented with a dull mash up of unfocused and confusing story threads. It does begin with an interesting set up of Robin Wright playing herself. She gets herself scanned as she is owned by the studio and they want a computerised version of her image with all the emotions included so they can do whatever they want with it. The scanning scene itself is very dull as we see a scanner trying unsuccessfully to make Robin Wright to feel each and every emotion while the scanning process is happening, but then Robin Wrights manager Al (Harvey Keitel) saves the day with a dull story which contains an emotional response of every kind and seems to go on forever! It then jumps to 20 years later when Robin Wright is a bit older and she ingests some sort of drug which enters her into a limitless, animated world. It seems quite unrelated as to what has happened before but we go with it anyway as the visuals and music are really quite lovely. What follows is a convoluted mess that is needlessly confusing and ironically shallow for a film that is satirising the shallow nature of celebrity. It is also very surprising that for a film where so much is happening and with all the great sound and imagery how boring it is. It really is dull because of the mess it finds itself in as the film goes on and I did find myself losing interest in all it's fragmented disarray.
It really is sad to watch as there was obviously a talented team of creative people which made the great transitions from animation to live action possible. It is very meticulous and achieved brilliantly and for that I applaud the animators and visual artists. I think the pretentious and unfocused writing let it down and the need to cram in as much as possible so much so that not even the lasting memory will be wow! that looked fantastic, but more like, wow! I can't believe how boring that was!
It really is sad to watch as there was obviously a talented team of creative people which made the great transitions from animation to live action possible. It is very meticulous and achieved brilliantly and for that I applaud the animators and visual artists. I think the pretentious and unfocused writing let it down and the need to cram in as much as possible so much so that not even the lasting memory will be wow! that looked fantastic, but more like, wow! I can't believe how boring that was!