This Friday I watched the film “What Happened to Monday”. It was a strange film to say the least. I think that the futuristic world portrayed in which everyone is obligated to only have one child and all children are locked away in “sleep mode” until an undetermined future utopia where everything is abundant and wonderful is heavily unrealistic. In terms of quality of acting, all the characters were difficult to believe and everything they said and all their actions didn’t really make sense to me. Firstly, there was no backstory. The female leader is oddly cold and unfeeling. I have a hard time believing that people would allow her to take power. Secondly, the seven siblings’ polar opposite identities was distracting and real twins are not that vastly different.
Next, I don’t understand how the entire world would place all power in the hands of one individual. It just doesn’t make sense and wouldn’t happen in the real world. In addition, an overpopulated world doesn’t mean everyone should have only one child. China’s One Child Policy proves this doesn’t work in the end. Recently, they even revoked that law. More focus should be on educating people in developing countries and helping social issues improve. Maybe if that happened, new ways could be found to sustain resources. I was also quite outraged at the level of violence in the movie. If more attention was payed to the story, maybe all these plot holes would be fixed.
In conclusion, I found the cinematic elements lacking in creativity and logic. However, the questions of power and how people use it is interesting. They could have been more central to the plot.
I definitely agree on the “lacking in creativity and logic” point. The film was a grab bag of cliches and one-liners trying way too hard. Some lines were clearly attempts to give characters depth but actually just reduced them to stock characters, and some just came out of nowhere, like “you’re supposed to be the one who believes.”
The lack of realism in addition to the excessive drama really killed any message this film had to me. I can see where people are coming from with the power argument but I don’t think this film was anything special on that front. There are more impactful stories to be found all over the place in real life.
I see where you’re coming from on the character development side, as they did all feel cliche. However, I think the movie’s premise has more basis in reality than you. We have seen a number of regimes in which one person has unilateral power (Stalin, Mao, Hitler, and Castro to name a few) and the government profits off of the civilians by force. I agree with you that this is a terrible idea and I truly hope other solutions to the world’s problems take form, but it is a very real possibility.
The realism point I made wasn’t about the totalitarianism. It was about a lot of smaller things adding up (you can read my post to see what, though I got a little carried away). You’re absolutely right that power abuse is a real problem.