| A simple story
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| A complicated tale
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| Seen it before
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| A fresh perspective
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| Visually ordinary
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| Special effects-y
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Why had I never heard of this film?? It was a good one for me. It had elements of many sci-fi movies I like... Matrix, Dark City, stuff like that. I liked it a bunch.
The point of the film: The people in charge decide that the only way to prevent warfare is to prevent people from getting all emotional about things. They make a drug that removes the furor and excitement that leads to war. It actually deadens all emotions. Having any emotions at all is a Sense Offense. There is, of course, and underground which deals in feelings....
But how do you enforce such a thing? Well, there are these Clerics who are sort of empathic -- they feel when others feel. They find the Sense Offenders, and, generally, shoot them.
If you like action/adventure and science fiction with a little dash of something-to-think-about, this is a good pick. If you don't like people taking a bullet, I would steer clear of the film -- many folks get taken down. And the bloodletting gets more real and bloody as the film progresses.
There are some problems with the concept -- everyone is supposed to be completely unfeeling, but even the Clerics, the most unfeeling off all, have pride and loyalty. One Cleric even tells another how happy he was that they were working together. You might want to leave words like "happy" out of the language of someone who has no feeling. They sort of explain it away a little as being words that we have used forever, and we still use them in the same context, even if they have no meaning. It's brought up a couple times in the film, in terms of using phrases like "I'm sorry," as being just a rejoinder to some event, rather than something that has actual meaning. And we all do stuff like that all the time -- next time someone asks, "How ya doin?" answer truthfully, don't just say, "Fine."
Overall, the movie succeeded on most levels, so I recommend it! Good for watching, and for talking about afterward.
