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Reviews
2149: The Aftermath (2016)
Boring, and a huge cash grab at the anti-covid, anti-government group. Molly Parker's eyebrows save the day, tho.
Warning: i wasted 40 minutes on this movie waiting for it to get better before fast forwarding to something actually happening. So I'm a little bitter and it shows.
I am often one of those people that watches a movie and goes, "That was good!" only to find out that everyone else hated it. My standards are quite low, is what I'm trying to say, so it's almost impressive how bad I think this movie is. There's more plot holes than there is actual plot, the world isn't fleshed out outside of literally the bare minimum needed to make their point of technology ruining society, and the characters are incredibly generic with no development.
The one saving grace that this movie has is that it sometimes has vaguely original takes on an overdone trope of a dystopian post-war future caused by the government hating its citizens for whatever reason.
It's like someone took the concept of "nothing technically HAS to happen in a movie" from Napoleon Dynamite and made it into a bad sci-fi movie with a thinly (I'm talking 2-ply toilet paper) veiled metaphor for "government bad! Technology bad! Both together? Even worser!"
The movie's metaphor is fitting for the way a lot of people feel about life under covid right now, so I am 99% sure they rereleased it under a different name for a cash grab, because it's been released under 3 different names since 2016. I'm also pretty sure any above-4-star ratings are from people who enjoyed it only due to their political beliefs. Even then, it doesn't matter what your political beliefs are, this is just a bad movie.
You could have literally participated in the January 6th riots, and I would still expect you to be sensible enough to be like, "yeah, but this is just a bad movie." I've seen better and more intriguing depictions of ~the human spirit~ and "my life is a lie?!" in my little brother's face when he found out Santa wasn't real, but he was still going to get presents, so it's whatever.
The acting is also quite subpar from everyone but Molly Parker. There's a 4-second scene where Parker's character is responding to a perceived threat, and all she does is literally turn around with a *slight* furrow in her brow, and you can see the incredibly notable difference in quality of acting. A literal eyebrow had more believable emotion than this entire movie. Which is surprising considering most of the main actors have decent resumes, so I have no idea why they have the charismatic equivalent to bird poop on your car the day after you washed it.
I guess you could say it's technically plot driven? Because it surely isn't driven by character development. Because there isn't any. Unless you count the main character's mom; despite having the most interesting plot-line of the movie- a mom who had to abandon her kid and then turned insane from isolation and drugs- she was STILL so incredibly boring. Her "loss of touch with reality" was her vaping, playing video games, and becoming mute. Most college students do that every other weekend, which I guess you could say is also, The Whole Point Of The Movie, but that doesn't mean it's actually good.
((Also, the main character's entire goal, and the climax of the movie, is realized by finding his mother, and after seeing that she's a brain dead druggie and that there is technically no government (?? Or something like that??), he literally just leaves. He's like "woah. I guess I'm free now. Sorry you're a traumatized mute, mom, ima leave, love you tho."))
There's also an attempt at commentary on how a 9-5 only serves to keep you dependent on it, which is also the government's fault, but it's soooo superficial and blatant that they might as well have just had the narrator say it at the beginning and spared us all a watch- and this is coming from someone who agrees with that point. The narration is also annoying. The voice actor is great, but the use of narration is random and 100% used out of laziness instead of actually contributing anything.
The characters are 2-D, uninteresting, and generic "I'm one of the good guys because there's nothing controversial about me! Because, I don't have a personality!" kind of characters. You might as well have had them wearing halos if they were supposed to be any more pure to drive home the message of being The Good Guys, Uncorrupted By TikTok. It's amazing how every character was literally just a plot device. I've actually never seen that done before.
The camera work was pretty decent, but everything was so saturated that you didn't get dystopian vibes at all. There was no filter to set the mood, so it looked like you were just looking at an iPhone video. I guess you could say that's aLsO a MeTaPhOR, but again. It doesn't make it good.
There's also a scene where they're supposed to be roughing it in the wild, dressed in rags and surrounded by a make-shift home they built *around* nature. And everything looked brand new. I'm pretty sure they bought the table and "hand-made" gazebo from home-depot's clearance section the day before filming. Their dishes and cutlery were almost distractingly shiny and unscathed; it's just one of the many little details that pulls you out of the movie.
Overall, it feels like no one put any thought into this movie outside of trying to capitalize off of those who get their covid and media awareness from the-REAL-truth.com and Fox News. The most captivating thing about this movie was literally Molly Parker's eyebrows.
The end.