s-naderfouad

This series is not for those looking for an entertaining sci-fi. Those who struggled with the monotony, repetitiveness, and slowness of this show just simple missed the basic point of it. On the surface, it's about the torture of working in a cubicle, doing a meaningless 9-5 job. The slowness, the slow torture, the break room, the minimalist office with green ceiling and neon white light, it's all meant to induce in you a claustrophobic feeling. This is the true essence of office work when you go into the office during the day and leave after sundown.

Admittedly, its confronting for the vast majority of us because a boring, repetitive, neon-lit, intrinsically meaningless, nine-to-five office job is exactly as torturous as working at Lumon. But who's willing to admit that that which takes up half of our walking hours is simply nothing worth wasting our lives over? Or who's willing to recognise that our jobs probably need us more than we need it? You find yourself questioning the things in your life that force you to think that you need to keep doing that which drains the life out of you.

I believe this is a rich and multilayered series and poses a lot of very interesting questions beyond the basic premise.

Consider the idea that the desire to be free could be innate, like in the case of Helly R. She was "born" in the office, but she finds it all excruciatingly limiting and torturous.

Or consider that if we weren't all so socially biased, same-sex love would not be so controversial and requiring the whole of humanity to decide on its legality... You see Irv and Burt following their desire to connect and the only objectionable thing they're doing is having an "office romance." As an example, you see Dylan questions that relationship as much as he does Mark and Helly's developing friendship.

The show leaves you with a lot of intriguing questions: Why they only focused on the data that provokes fear? And what does this mean?

What did the gory paintings mean?

And who does Kier represent?

There also seems to be religious connotations too; consider Cobel's shrine, the song, the statue... Ultimately, what does Lumon do?

This is a different series from all the dystopian drama out there. I'm quite impressed and I'm curious about the second season.

At first when I saw the IMDb score and read the synopsis, I thought this will be a great movie... And for the first 5 or 7 minutes I had this impression. But then the movie started to slowly kill my hopes. This is a movie about a girl who discovers she is going to die and so she decides to go out and punish the whole world for it, including herself. There's a thin line between moving and pathetic. And this movie is about pathetic people, not unfortunate, poor, struggling people. First she starts off writing her list of "things to do before I die", like: telling her kids she loves them more often, finding another woman for her husband, going to the beach with her husband, going to see her dad who's in jail, smoking and drinking... But the following is where the list goes a little mischievous: 1- Record birthday messages to her 6 and 4 year old daughters until they're 18 (If they can move on, let's make sure we turn each and every birthday a depressing occasion of remembering mom is dead) 2- Have sex with other men to see what it's like (she lies to the husband -who she seems to love- about going to die and cheats on him too, no harm in that too!!) 3- Make someone fall in love with me (She seems to be in love with her husband and keeps telling him she loves him, but then she wants to torture another man by making him fall in love with her, while she's supposedly happily married and also... DYING!)

So, on top of her list is to tell her girls she loves them everyday, but instead of wanting to spend what's left of her life with her loved ones, she leaves them with the neighbor, who has just moved in, after a 5- minute talk to go and screw the new guy's life. I can understand if people decide to become a little selfish when they realize there's very little time on their hands, but to decide to be mean to her mother, to cheat on her husband, to lie to another man and make him fall in love with her and to ditch her girls with a total stranger is just pure nonsense when the plot tries to convince you she's sacrificing for everyone's sake!

There almost isn't anyone who's normal in this movie. A pathetic work colleague who's obsessed with diets and food (as in literally talking about diets/food in every scene she appears on). A pathetic grandmother who tells her grand daughters creepy stories and whines about her life in a super pathetic way. A pathetic waitress in a coffee shop who wishes to win the lottery in order to transform her looks to look like Cher! A pathetic boyfriend who has absolutely no furniture, God knows why! A pathetic father in jail who sews shoes and asks the daughter he hasn't seen in years for her daughters' shoe sizes. And ultimately a pathetic, dying, 23 year old girl who wastes entirely all the time left in her life over things that cannot even qualify to be labeled wishes, to say the least. This is it about the plot and the characters. The script is weird, creepy and makes no sense, interrupted by irrelevant, pathetic, emotionless voice-over. The acting is terrible, you can hardly sense any emotions from all actors. Like when she receives the news of her terminal cancer so she weeps for a few seconds then asks the doctor for a piece of candy! The movie is so boring, moving slowly between unreasonable events, to eventually meet the inevitable, very expected and disappointing end. I really can't get my head around why this movie scored 7.6 on IMDb!