Sleep Dealer is the full length directorial debut of Alex Rivera. I can find a vast amount of descriptions of the budget as low, minuscule, or tiny, but I can't seem to find an exact number. Either way, it can easily be lumped in with the new trend of low budget, unique sci-fi movies to come out. I was debating whether or not to review this, or make a post about the similarities between it and District 9.
There are a lot of them. Both are low budget, full length debuts from a director. Both have unique stories that are metaphors for real life issues preminent in the directors places of birth. Both are set in areas not normally common to a sci-fi movie. And both have some elements of cliche story telling within their creative plot ideas. Still, one of them made over $100 million and the other only $75,000.
Sleep Dealer imagines a future not too far from now. Where a new technology called nodes allow people to connect themselves directly to a future version of the Internet. Once connected, you can work a job from across the world, upload your memories and sell them to interested parties, or just scratch your perverted, sexual itch.
In this world we follow Memo, a poor farmer, living near the Mexico/American border. He manages to get his family into some trouble, and travels to the city to get nodes so he can earn money for them. Here comes that metaphor I was telling you about. The job he gets allows him to link up with a construction robot in California. An interesting idea on the future of the immigration and labor issues, but the movie never really explores the politics of that situation any further.
Instead we are told a completely different story, of a girl that Memo meets and falls in love with and the things she does to inadvertently bring someone else into his life. It dips very slightly into some Romantic Comedy (without the comedy) genre cliches, but their relationship isn't the entire story. It's more a story of a struggling, poor Mexican village, and how one of the villagers manages to fight back, if only a little bit.
It's not an amazing story, but it's unique enough to be a worthwhile watch. Unlike District 9 however, I don't think it made enough money to catapult Alex Rivera to the levels that Neill Blomkamp is surely at now. His next movie will likely be as low budget as this one was. But hopefully someone like Peter Jackson will take notice of him. I'd love to see what he could do with even the relatively low budget District 9 got, let alone the budget Blomkamp will most likely get for his next release.
Score: 4 out of 5
Confused about our rating system? Read this explanation.
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September 13, 2009
DVD Review: Sleep Dealer
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1 comments:
Though the plot is a bit thin in parts, I thought this was a very inventive and gritty portrayal of a very plausible near-future.
There's an uncommon authenticity to the tech in this film and I especially appreciated that it's used to support the story but the movie doesn't get mired down in the tech.
Still, it would've been worth a few minutes to explore the disorientation that would certainly come from node implantation - you'd have to imagine that it'd take some time to acclimate to a whole new type of sensory input. It was cool how getting nodes in this future was culturally similar to the tattoo subculture of today but that also wasn't played up to its fullest.
The scenes showing the drone workers would've had more impact if they'd been shot in a way to suggest that there were thousands, rather than dozens.
Did you pick up on the nods to "Robocop" throughout the first half of the film?
By the way, it might be useful to mention that this film is almost entirely in Spanish, with English subtitles.
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