Overall Impression:

What Happened to Monday is a fun, action-packed romp with interesting themes of power, fear, and control. Naomi Rapace’s performance as all seven sisters is extremely impressive, on par with Tatiana Maslany’s work as the many clones of Orphan Black. She imbues each sister with different physical and verbal mannerisms that, together with the creative costuming, make them easy to tell apart. The pacing of the film is exhilarating, with unrelenting moments of suspense, action, and drama. It’s incredible impressive how the creators of the film managed to piece together an interesting, enjoyable, thought-provoking movie from a bizarre premise.

Power:

During her introduction, Graduate Resident Fellow Magdala mentioned that the actions of the government in What Happened to Monday reminded her of the writings of Michel Foucault, a French philosopher. While I can’t pretend to know anything about Foucault, or philosophy in general, I do see how Foucault’s writings can be used to analyze the dystopian regime of What Happened to Monday. Foucault focused on mechanisms of power, and he emphasized the connection between knowledge and power. In the film, the government used a registry on individuals, regional checkpoints, reproduction limits, propaganda, doublespeak, and reproduction restrictions to control the people. The government hid the truth about “cryosleep” and dominated the discussion of the subject using euphemisms and relentless propaganda. Through these actions, it controlled the people’s knowledge, and therefore controlled the people, preventing resistance.

Moral Dilemmas:

My primary frustration with this film was its failure to fully explore the interesting moral dilemma posed by cryosleep. If the Earth were dangerously overpopulated, should we freeze some of the population so that they may live their lives in a better, future world? Would it be selfish to keep our children with us at the cost of forcing them to live in our own resource-starved world? How would we even determine when the world was in a good enough state for us to awaken them? Because the cryosleep machine is revealed to be an execution chamber, the film avoids actually having to deal with this question, cheaply justifying the protagonists’ point of view. This practice of dodging tough questions is frustratingly prevalent in science fiction. One recent example of this phenomenon is the superhero film Black Panther. In the film, the antagonist, Erik Killmonger, does make good arguments for violent resistance against oppressors. However, this point of view is never given a fair treatment, because the character espousing it is consistently murderous, cruel, and selfish. His own villainous behaviors mean that the writers never have to morally justify T’Challa’s prevention of the violent resistance. One series that consistently approaches these difficult questions head-on is Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror, a science fiction anthology that explores the relationships between humans and technology. Each episode explores different technology- related moral dilemmas without these types of gimmicks.