Review of Metropia

Metropia (2009)
7/10
Cool visual style, intriguing premise, but doesn't hold together
8 March 2011
Warning: Spoilers
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.
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