kewlcity

The film weaves around four stories all happening in metropolitan, dehumanizing Jakarta. In fact that is what it is about, the quality of meaninglessness of living in a place that turns people into zombies.

In a place where meaning must be invented, these kids turn into the only place, the only culture they see worth tuning into: television and movies. Thus they slowly degenerate into the abysmal reinterpretation in a sort of sickening anti-hero, anti-social statements that goes absurdly a wrong turn.

Plot may not be all important for a film that tries to depict a social reality. I like many films that are lacking in plots, 'stealing beauty' comes to mind. Yet the only drawback would be in the absurdity of the actions taken by these kids and grown up. The director goes into a surreal world where the actors imitate movies and pop-culture in their pathetic effort at coming into meaning and leaving the desolate loneliness that comes out of meaninglessness.

I have to criticize that the absurdity was too pervasive and mocks the beauty that the director might have achieved in making less a better thing at their exaggerated symbolic impositions. They could have made better symbolic gestures than the laughable depictions seen here.

All in all, a pretty good flic at social criticism on the dehumanizing aspect of metropolitan living and the rootlessness of the newer generation that desperately need meaning and relation in a bewildering world where they can't seem to put two and two together.

This is a masterpiece of science fiction more than the usual sf thriller like Aliens. Science Fiction always deal more with the human side of science and this one not only creatively done that. It was a sociological expose of a dystopian society (the end spectrum of Orwellian '1984' where instead of a regulated dictatorship of big brother, we have the anarchy of the capitalist corporate power above anything else) and where a moral apotheosis was asked: where does humanity lies?

The film is about a group of androids, wanting to prolong their existence they went to Los Angeles, as androids had a redundancy period of four years. But Harisson Ford plays as Rick Deckard a blade runner whose job was to dispose such androids. Thus was the moral dillema: he was a murderer of innocent lives. And he had to live with the fact.

The whole somber atmosphere of the movie was briliant. The production of future Los Angeles seems to me to be better than most modern CGI animated sequences and doesn't have that exageratedness than CGI could produce (like in the new Star Wars movie). The 'simplicity' of depicting a future haunting Los Angeles was the best I've seen in any sf flics. The only other atmosphere that had produced such effect of estrangement I think would be in 'eXistenz'.

The most poignant scene that I would rate in my movie history was when the leader of the Android (played by Rutger Hauer) had saved the live of Deckard and said: 'I've seen the way the sun shines on the gates of Tannenbaum' or something of that order. It was such a deep scene that conveyed to my mind the existence of humanity and a whole human life in his short existence. It was like reading a novel, that scene conjure such a spectable of imagery of another existence. He was telling Deckard how human he was and how he loved life. More than human, more than morose Deckard.

It is a spectacular glympse to another world more so than the epics (like Star Wars) because it only glympse it. Because it allows with in its enigmatic way the possibility of a grand world beyond anyone's dream. Like the above scene, we can only gauged at the scene of the gate of Tannenbaum or the burning of a spaceship. For we've only seen a slice of such a world.