December 22, 2017 3 min to read

Downsizing

What a waste of a great premise. I could have done without the tiny gigolos.

by Zach Saul

Man, what a shame it is that better writers/filmmakers didn’t get ahold of the Downsizing rights, because it’s actually a really cool concept. What we got instead was a 2 hour 15 minute mess of disconnected ideas, and unlikeable characters. What’s so infuriating about Downsizing is all of the concepts, questions, and ideas they chose NOT to explore - and not necessarily the sleepy screenplay they DID make. So in that spirit Instead of engaging deeply with what I felt was a lazy and poorly written movie for this review: I’m going to outline my two ideas for how to fix it.

Alternate Film A: Genre: Thriller/Horror Due to overpopulation, the government has mandated that forty percent of the population undergo a non-voluntary miniaturization procedure. The government claims to have a random selection process as for who gets miniaturized but the poor strongly suspect the system is rigged against them: sparking nationwide protests and resentment between the big and the small. Political unrest grows as a campaign to restrict the voting rights of the small gets proposed (on the grounds that they don’t contribute to the global economy) and impatient large citizens begin imprisoning small citizens in “human zoos”. Academics argue that these zoos provide profound anthropological value despite the suffering of their inhabitants - and the miniature citizens hatch a plan to expose the truth about their treatment.

Alternate Film B: Genre: Comedy that’s Actually Funny As much as I enjoy Matt Damon: he wouldn’t be allowed to come within 100 feet of this production, and instead the producers of Downsizing enlist Fred Armisen and Kristen Schaal play the married leads in a comedic adaption of the film. Bird attacks, diplomatic relations with earthworms, and giant bubbles plague everyday life for the citizens of leisure-land. The movie’s central conflict revolves around an argument between Armisen’s character and Schaal’s: whether or not the wife was flirting with the husbands best friend. The bickering couple travel away from their miniature village into the full sized world to consult the regular sized experts about their petty marital issues, and each sneaks off on their own to rig the quest against the other in an attempt to win the argument.

The Good: Downsizing is to be fair - a concept with potential, and does have moments/ideas that leave you thinking “Huh - that’s interesting, I wonder where they’ll go with that?” One example (that I used to spin my Horror/Thriller concept): A character asks Matt Damon if he thinks little people should have voting rights given their stature and economic/tax contributions. Taken at face value, this is a very interesting question.

The Bad:
The problem is that Downsizing never, ever goes anywhere with it’s interesting ideas, and instead invites us to watch Matt Damon “find himself” in the arms of a Serbian gigolo. The movie also carries a bizarre attack on environmentalism, that doesn’t make any sense. Downsizing is supposedly something citizens are doing to prevent overpopulation. The movie carries this idea that - agreeing to shrink yourself is incredibly noble, and “earth-friendly”. The problem is that all the downsized people behave even more selfishly than the fully grown humans. Throughout the movie characters question the merits and motivation of environmentalism - but never with any intellectual merit, nor comedic cleverness.