movie review - What Happened To Monday
the journal of Michael Werneburg
twenty-seven years and one million words
This is a movie set in a near/alternate future in which GMO's were necessitated by an ecological collapse - humanity was starving. However, those then led to widespread health problems such as congenital malformations. So humanity embarks on an experiment in which a one-child policy is enforced with the idea being that any "surplus" children are put into stasis until the population is low enough to sustain them. Into this world a set of septuplets is born. The girls are identical so they are raised by their grandfather as one person, each experiencing the outside world on only one day of the week.
Given the smart title and the cast I somehow expected this to be a lot smarter than it actually was. One thing that I think modern movie-writers are struggling with is that technology is moving so fast and in such an all-consuming direction that it's hard to show people living in anything like a life we'd like. In this film the ruse eventually is discovered when the girls are already adults with a thriving career. Their attempts at surviving the police state of the time shows how futile any kind of independent life really is going to be. It's a major drag, and what's worse I don't see any way around it - the carefree days of the '90s are clearly never coming back. Anyway, I think the writers felt themselves painted into a corner by the always-on, always-present surveillance and the apparatus behind it. Because we seem to see a plot dealing more in dancing around those scenarios than really dealing with the fact that none of these women could have done the things the movie has suggested - having ever had privacy, for instance, or conversely concealing that they had never had intimacy with someone else.
In looking for something smarter, I think I wanted something along the lines of a psychological treatment or perhaps something involving more intelligence work. The whole thing - from the way the women behaved to the way the world is depicted comes across as naive and leaves a lot of logical progression unrealized.
Not recommended.