Downsizing

Das möchte ich von Wes Anderson sehen! Ein spannender Start in eine originelle und – was das Zuschauererlebnis betrifft – auch vielversprechende Filmwelt, in der sich die Autoren mit interessanten Themen auseinandersetzen, die ich nicht sehr ansprechend fand (die Lösungen). Es ist kein verschwendetes Potenzial eines außergewöhnlichen Filmereignisses, es ist nur ein Filmereignis für eine Zuschauergruppe, zu der ich einfach nicht gehöre. Über Waltz’ Dušan habe ich mich amüsiert. Ich hoffe, dass ihn in einer Komödie im Stil von The Big Lebowski die Brüder Coen nutzen werden! (24.01.2018)

I like Alexander Payne's work very much and so far he has never disappointed me, but this one was a misstep. The basic premise is fine, I get what he wanted to convey to the audience, at the beginning it's full of interesting scenes and ideas, but in the last act it completely falls apart under the director's hands, when you get the feeling that Payne is either taking a solid piss at you or showing a loss of judgement. The only thing missing was Monty Python in a hug with Ashtar Sheran, I guess that's how unintentionally self-parodic it made me feel. It’s just a mess, what can I tell you? (11.04.2018)

In recent years, Alexander Payne has been filming the same story about aging white men who discover rather too late that they have wasted most of their lives and so they set out to find something that gives their empty lives meaning. Set in a world where people can be shrunk down to roughly six inches in order to improve their lives and save the planet, Downsizing is basically no exception; it just has a more ambitious scope and, in addition to the crisis of the individual, attempts to also address the crisis of western society, or rather the whole world, to which Payne adapted the genre and narrative structure. ___ At the beginning, the film switches from an individual point of view to a global perspective and subsequently applies the same technique to Damon’s physiotherapist character, who finds the solution to his problems by becoming more interested in the world around him so that he comes to the conclusion that it is necessary to start with smaller goals (i.e. local, not global). The core of the film comprising a bitter comedy that questions faith in the American dream and never-ending American prosperity is supplemented with a sci-fi satire and (melo)drama with a relatively explicit political-environmental message. Sometimes I wasn’t sure if a scene was supposed to come across as sardonic (because a character says something terribly kitschy and literal and Christoph Waltz smiles like a simpleton) or touching. ___ A bigger problem is the fact that Payne and co-writer Jim Taylor are at times unable to decide whether they are more interested in the characters or in the downsized world they invented for them and whose laws we are now discovering together with the protagonists. The whole idea of downsizing seemed to me like a gimmick serving more or less only as scathing commentary on what people are willing to go through to improve their social status. At its core, this is a variation of a well-known Payne story that could happen even in the real world. I see the sci-fi level mainly as a way to facilitate the work and to more quickly confront the characters with the dilemmas that the screenplay is intended to address. __ The resulting hybrid holds together primarily thanks to Matt Damon, who is just as convincing as a paunchy forty-something with mild depression as he is as secret agent with lethal skills. The genre transformations that the film undergoes partly reflect the development of his character, toward whom Payne is far too indulgent in comparison with his earlier films (often at the expense of stereotyped female characters). ___ In many respects, Downsizing is a rather problematic film and definitely not perfect, but it clearly made an impression on me. And perhaps the real reason I feel the need to defend it instead of maligning it is the laughing Christoph Waltz as a Serbian smuggler named Dusan Mirkovic, who is ably supported Udo Kier. 75% (07.01.2018)

A great premise that initially made me feel as if I was watching something by the director Frank Oz. It is appropriately off-the-wall, crazy, and features a number of great actors. I didn’t actually laugh, but it was oozing with great ideas, which could be expected from a movie like this. With time the story started to evolve (especially in Norway) into a pretty strange something, which is trying to give its point global importance and educate us about the topic of the current population of the Earth. Over time I started to question what the creators actually wanted to convey, and I ended up questioning what they were actually trying to achieve. It stopped making sense to me. And if it wasn’t for the final “earthquake” I wouldn’t even laugh. In the end, I was glad that I ended up at three stars. It could have been worse, even though I didn’t think so in the beginning. (02.10.2018)

It is almost a sin to turn such an interesting material into a film so uninteresting, boring and without creativity. Matt Damon is going downhill, his quite possibly last good film was The Martian, he has disappointed twice this year and his upcoming film Oceans' 8 doesn't have much of a future. The first hour of the film was still passable and Christoph Waltz gave it quite an energy, but after the arrival of the annoying Vietnamese woman who got on my nerves like no character in a long time, the film degraded two notches and also absolutely deviated from the original concept – I felt I was watching a different film. 40%. (11.02.2018)

I had a little trouble with Alexander Payne every time. The main characters of his stories are always looking for the meaning of life, their salvation, or a new goal, and usually go in endless circles while I often shake my head at how their situation somehow resolves itself. Downsizing is a shock to me for that reason. The main character actively tries to solve his unhappy situation each time, helps others (often by accident or unwillingly), and is constantly moving forward in peculiar directions. In addition, the topics that Payne and Jim Taylor stitched together are such a mess that I could hardly keep up with the necessary moods and settings. Ecology, marriage crises, migration, overpopulation, sci-fi tangents, harmony with nature, the wealthy, loneliness, dead ends of the future. And each time with an abundance of details. This story has everything, and its conflicting reception clearly shows that maybe there is too much for the audience. However, thanks to the presence of about ten familiar favorite faces in the smallest roles, I consider myself one of the most satisfied. (11.01.2018)

A grey movie with a great idea (shrinking people) that actually ended up being something secondary. You can tell a story like that even in a normally large setting. It will be colorless the same way. A classic about how an internally dissatisfied man comes to happiness, all it takes is for his wife to kick him in the ass and for him to find an Eastern European friend... 50%. (28.04.2020)

Ein niedlich positives Drama und eine erfrischende sowie überraschende Auffassung eines scheinbar großartigen Science-Fiction-Stoffes, der einem ganz gewöhnlichen Menschen (es scheint, dass Matt Damon in dieser Hinsicht langsam den Staffelstab von Tom Hanks übernimmt) und seinen ganz gewöhnlichen Sorgen gewidmet ist. Alexander Payne hat es auf seine eigene Art und Weise geschrieben und gedreht, die Trailer haben bei weitem nicht alles verraten (man wird also auch überrascht), der Humor ist sehr angenehm, die Musik von Rolfe Kent macht süchtig und Christoph Waltz ist einfach toll. Das einzige, was mir leidgetan hat, war die kleine Rolle von Laura Dern… Aber andererseits war sie wenigstens für einen Moment da. (24.01.2018)

There’s no denying Downsizing has many excellent filmmaking ideas and processes that make it an interesting and original movie even today. The main narrative corridor initially is the premise of downsizing people in order to save a moribund Mother Earth, and it dramatises mainly the radical process of physical shrinkage, while the attention is led towards the characters’ getting used to the world of the future, which is described as an incredible adventure to the people of the “past”. After the anticipated key twist, however, Payne defies all expectations and presents an alternative world that essentially duplicates the real one in a small scale, including its social ills, and instead of the adventure and the discovery of the unknown, he focuses on expanding the knowledge of the protagonist, who becomes the dominant of the narration. The differences between the big and the small world gradually fade and blend in the closing part in Norway, which also brings in the idea of that huge, poverty-stricken world represented by the earnest and human Vietnamese girl, while the raunchy playboy Dušan represents that tiny corner of the world where everything is plentiful. Downsizing is definitely a peculiar statement about the state of modern society, though it’s hard to pinpoint in what sense it is actually special: as futuristic sci-fi with elements of social tragicomedy, or as a funny drama about people that portrays big and small social or economical differences with a subtle form of science fiction. Though I think the ending is intellectually shabby and that the potential duality of the fictional world is drowning in indecisiveness about how to best capture said duality (whether through the characters or the environment), I had pretty good fun despite the excessive runtime. I’m adding the fourth star also for the fact that, as it’s usual here, this is a very underrated movie. 70% (29.10.2018)

It's just so tricky to do these movies as pure social metaphor, because it’s terribly appealing to fall into simple, totally bitter theses. At least Lanthimos regularly churns these types of movies out with absurdity, comfortless visuals, and regular shrapnel erupting out of otherwise slow pacing and postmodern form. Instead, Payne has no distinctive formal method, and so he just kind of opportunistically flails around in it, at one point wanting to move us on a humane level or get us to empathize with his characters, then switching them whenever it suits him into simple caricatures that manage to redefine themselves abruptly in the span of a single sentence. Thus, in Downsizing, we find scenes straight out of South Park (the explosion of the vault entrance, Matt Damon suddenly drumming in hippie rags at sunset), scenes that look like the result of a movie fan party (a trashed Matt Damon partying with Christopher Waltz and Udo Kier), and scenes that are long enough and sensitive enough that someone might actually realize they're supposed to be sobbing and shaking their head with a wistful grin at the power of love, even in the most unlikely moments. And my nerve centers in my brain are simply no longer flexible enough to switch between all these modes so quickly and randomly. (16.01.2018)

Too bad the filmmakers couldn't avoid moralizing and the increasingly trendy fight to save the planet. It's not that I'm against protecting the Earth, but the more it's shoved down my throat, the more it gets on my nerves. The beginning of the film was okay. I was just about to get bored, but then Christoph Waltz stepped in, and his character was great as usual. I also liked the bossy Vietnamese dissident, and the film seemed to catch its second wind. I just wasn’t impressed by the journey among the Norwegian hippies. (27.06.2018)

This film is a pretty significant agitation, but it's conceived in such an epic and sometimes absurd way that even though I wanted to sleep I just kept watching on and on because I wanted to know how it would turn out. I wasn’t blown away by the ending, but thanks to the acting, visuals and script, this isn't just a matter of empty flailing, and there is a message in there. (30.03.2018)

"Nature is a patient sculptor. Each day she carves another piece, slowly, over thousands of years, to create this incredible beauty. What a shame, what a tremendous shame..." +++ In the context of what's been happening to our planet in recent years, I consider Downsizing to be a very underrated film. Just the central idea that the whole problem of global warming, for which humans are clearly the main culprits, could be solved by shrinking humanity, is endlessly intriguing. Moreover, the creators succeeded in perfectly outlining the difficulties this would probably bring on a global scale. They drew on infamous realities, from which they projected into the story mainly the current consumerist way of life of most people (oriented toward the tendency to "have", not "be"), the class division between rich and poor, and illegal migration and smuggling. There were a lot of themes that they covered, and I felt just like the main character Paul Safranek in Matt Damon's pleasantly civil performance, so lost and excited at the same time. Payne's film is thought-provoking, but he goes about it in a considerably lighter way, which just worked for me. (90%) (14.07.2021)