Let me
start off by saying this film is just bad: badly written script, quite a bit of
bad acting, and a messy plot that could have been improved in the hands of a
better, and maybe more experienced, writer. It’s a film about an ex-soldier,
Noel Clarke, suffering from PTSD who wakes up to find that he’s only conscious
for 9 minutes and 37 seconds at a time. As the plot unfolds we find out
*spoilers – though I’m saving you hassle here* that his treatment for PTSD was
a cover to use his body for a dying professor, Brian Cox, to live in as his own
body dies – with the help of his ridiculously posh son, Ian Somerhalder. This
then develops into a bigger conspiracy about a disgraced company who thinks
humanity can’t be trusted to look after itself so instead should be ran by two egomaniacal
men controlling the world population’s minds instead. Go figure.
The film is
set in the near future which means the London Bridge is still standing but that
London’s sky scrapers are now even more towering, more metallic and more, well,
futuristic. There are also blimps with adverts on them flying around like Blade
Runner or Fringe or… what is this obsession with blimps being some missed out
on genius advertising method? We tried, they failed, let it go science fiction.
There were amazing advances in genetically modifying and weaponising diseases,
there were DNA encoded guns so only certain people could fire them, and there
were plenty of the usual holograms and other futuristic givens. But there was
also another aspect of the future that makes me glad I won’t be there for it: misogyny.
Whilst some
like to pretend we have ‘equality’ amongst men and women we actually still have
a long way to go. So when I look to science fiction I look for a different
world, one where there are no longer arbitrary ideas about the abilities of men
and women or their roles in society. Yet here is a future of amazing
technological advances and women are still no more than ‘whores’ or dead wives
and mothers. It’s not only disappointing but it adds to the really bad writing
that the film generally shows. If you can’t write in a way that does 50% of the
population justice then maybe it’s time to admit you’re really just not a good
writer.
For
instance, some see prostitution and the sex industry as inevitable, as necessary
and heck some even see it as empowering for women but I think it is none of
those things. I think men are not entitled to sex, they are not entitled to buy
consent, and their penises will not fall off if they have to go without having
sex with a woman, who wouldn’t be doing it were she not paid. So why is it
always still a staple of future worlds? Why is it in adult science fiction and
fantasy it is used as a sign of the darker, seedier aspects of the world and
not one we’ve eradicated? Surely it’s a sign that the future for most men is
one where we still live under a patriarchy, where women are still objects for
sale, and honestly that just sounds really dull.
It’s boring
to go to a world full of immense possibilities and see those same old tired clichés
of two dimensional female characters played out again and again. Two reviews of
this film both called Alexis Knapp’s character Dana a ‘tart with a heart’, or a
variation of it, and it turns out it is a fictional trope; from films like
Pretty Woman to Moulin Rouge it is a character who is a prostitute but yet
manages to be kind – the idea that those things are mutually exclusive is
already terribly misogynistic.
But seems
as I tend to see women are actual human beings I try and give them the credit
they deserve, and Dana deserves more than the film, that trope, and the many
reviews that don’t even mention her give her. I missed the very beginning of
the film but I’m glad because in the trailer is the shot from where we first
see her – just after she has slept with the lead, after he paid her, and after
he wakes up out and becomes his real self again. In the trailer we see her
lying fully naked on her front on her bed, her backside framed for the men in
the audience; the person who made the trailer then followed through and used
this same shot of her for the frame that displays her name as though she is
only there to be a pretty naked body. So already we’re starting from the bar
being on the floor.
As the film
develops she is abducted by a vicious Russian pimp and is forced to hamper our protagonist,
for which she later apologises. In his attempt to rescue her we get a long, drawn
out slow motion fight sequence that felt more staged than anything; but, during
that scene Dana is left holding a gun up, aimed at her cruel pimp. Ryan, the
protagonist, tells her which code to use to fire the gun and she promptly kills
her pimp who was attempting to kill Ryan. So from there they are relatively
equal, they have both helped save each other’s lives and yet she is told to scurry
away, with a bag of money, so she doesn’t get hurt through whatever Ryan is
involved with.
The climax
of the film is where we get into what could have been a more interesting
character than Ryan or in fact any of the other characters, for me at least. After
stopping Ryan from committing suicide she helps him get to his potentially last
switch back to his real self, after fighting a losing battle against Cox’s
character taking over his body. So she locks him up in a crate and waits out
the three days until he comes back so the ending of the film can begin. But the
film glances over this part; it brushes past it and treats it like simple
exposition and filler. As we are coming at the film from Ryan’s perspective,
needed to follow his confusion of drifting in and out of consciousness, we lose
out on what could have been an interesting side of Dana’s obviously impressive
character.
Due to the
short time that Ryan is conscious each time Dana has to hide out right next to the abandoned building
where the Evil Masterminds in this film are playing out their plan, and keeping
a kidnapped child that our leads are randomly trying to save after his father
was killed for their grand plan. So already we’ve got immense skill from Dana
to get to the building, set up a base, and to do so all in complete secrecy
from the people who want Ryan dead. Then she needs to look after Ryan, keeping him
physically alive, all the while he’s not himself - while he is taken over by
the arrogant villain of this film. We know that at the start of this film he,
the professor, had hired her for sex and we later find out that it’s because
she happens to resemble the his late wife; as creepy as that is it also creates
tension for the three days that she looks after him. Whilst Ryan is in the box
she has given him a phone so he can answer the question “What is my son’s name?”,
her dead son, so she can know that it is actually Ryan who is conscious. So
during those three days she must go over to the body of a man she knows,
knowing his mind and consciousness are not there; she has to try to convince a
man who was in love with a woman who looks like her to eat and drink so Ryan
doesn’t die and has enough energy for the climax. When Ryan unlocks the phone
we can see many messages have been sent between the two, I find it hard to
believe that after three days their conversations didn’t drift away from his ‘let
me out’s and her ‘no’s.
So then
Ryan finally wakes up, and out she comes all prepared for battle, even ready
with weapons – for a tart with a heart she is very prepared and clearly
resourceful. Once in the building we get the usual shrugging off of her
character as she is later held hostage by Somerhalder’s tweed wearing character
Harkin. She has once again reverted back to simply being a damsel in distress
and stands there simply waiting for her death. As she is saved by the film’s
lead she is thrown aside, and promptly pretends to be knocked out. Later during
the fight between Ryan and Harkin she gets up and saves him by beating Harkin
over the head, and that’s… kind of it for the rest of the fight. Her skills in
battle, despite having killed a man earlier in the film, are reduced to saving
the lead and then taking a back step so he can finish saving the day.
After the
battle is won and the world is saved from mass mind control we find Ryan waking
up in a weirdly white building, fresh cuts on his neck and then Dana walks into
the room. She explains, as that is what she’s there for, that she did surgery
on him to remove what was controlling his mind, rescued the boy, and bought
them a house to hide out in. So then there’s a joke about her taking control of
him in the bedroom and the film ends.
Wait, what?
Dana was a
nurse and yet she is apparently skilled enough to do careful surgery on his
neck, not cutting any arteries, and keeping him infection free for the time he’s
recovering; all whilst doing this and looking after him she looks after a traumatised
young boy and buys a house and maintains it and feeds everyone. I know the film
has a disrespect for women and them being autonomous human beings but what she
has done single handedly was not only very impressive but it is used as nothing
more than a throw away reason that Ryan happens to stay alive long enough to
have his happy ending. Considering Dana was initially shrugged off its amazing
what she does throughout and it is baffling how the writer insists that she is
nothing more than a way to help move the plot along.
I could go
on about how in the film it’s ridiculous to equate cars and records as
deserving of equal nostalgia in any form of near distant future, I could go on
about how boring it is to use dead women purely as sources for men’s pain, and
I could go on about how insulting it is to control the entire human race to
stop wars that are caused by men, and not by women and children who would
suffer through this plan but I won’t. This film simply represents a long
existing problem that science fiction has of being utterly unimaginative; it is
meant to be a genre outside of the present day, outside of a patriarchal
structure, and even outside of Earth – so why just copy it? Why just replicate
a tired old world that is run by men, mostly white men, one where women are
inconsequential props, and where people of colour apparently don’t exist (if
Noel Clarke hadn’t directed, produced, and slightly written this then the
diversity of the cast is woeful). It shows a complete lack of imagination, it
is a sign of a writer who is unable to step out of the culture he lives in and
see something more, and most importantly it is the sign of a writer I want
nothing to do with.
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