Thanks for the memories!

Save your money for something good and enjoyable

Horrible, fascist and poorly acted

It's funny watching the elements come together in this complicated scam. On one hand, the set-up isn't quite as complex as it seems, but there's an easy sense of fun in every exchange.

Most of you are familiar with Jib-Jab--the comedy site that uses WEIRD animations for greeting cards and comedy clips. It's a very peculiar and distorted style you just have to see to understand. Well, with the film "Metropia", it looks like someone used the Jib-Jab software to make a feature-length movie. So, you have a BIZARRE sort of CGI with strange, jerky animation--animation that is very, very gray and dark as well.Trying to explain what I saw in "Metropia" is very, very difficult. The film is just plain weird and the plot is beyond words...but I'll try. It's set in a dystopic Europe in 2024. Everything is gray and muted...and oppressive. All the cities of Europe have become connected through their subways and everything seems dull and mirthless. The hero, or at least the main character, is a bald guy named Roger. He begins hearing voices in his head and you later learn that it's caused by a shampoo marketed by some evil corporation. None of it makes the least bit of sense and it seems like a look inside the mind of a paranoid schizophrenic. He has some odd adventures and meets an odd woman who he's not sure whether to trust or not--but he's hypnotically drawn to her. The film is filled with adult language and nudity. However, the nudity is among the least sexy nudity I've ever seen--practically as appealing as elderly porn! The people are distorted, strange and unattractive and seeing them nude is just icky. Because of this, you might want to think twice before showing this to your kids or mother!As far as the overall product goes, it is an interesting experiment--but an unappealing one as well. The film is completely bereft of energy and fun and is an endurance contest to finish. Not pleasant but innovative...and creepy. This one has practically no commercial appeal and is just plain odd... By the way, Stalingrad Station is in Paris, if you really care.

It's a really great idea, the concept of the voices. And then taking it to another level. The animation might need a bit of time getting used to, but it does work excellent once you get into that mindset (no pun intended). You should be easily offended by nudity too, if you want to watch. There's not much of it, but there is some, so be careful if you don't like animated nudity then.The concept should win you over, if you like conspiracies and it will satisfy them too. A really good sci-fi movie with a great voice cast (if you have the disc, watch the voice recording feature) and some nice overall ideas then.

I love the look of this movie. It looks like they took photographs, made the heads bigger than the body and the eyes bigger than they should be and animated the result. It is purposely non-fluid and wonderfully conveys a grim, claustrophobic quality. I also thought the basic premise was cool, but I'm going to put in a spoiler section to complain about how little sense it made, ultimately.********* SPOILER SECTION BELOW ************ In the movie, the protagonist hears a voice speaking paranoid thoughts. For example, it tells him his girlfriend might be cheating on him. But he doesn't feel they are his own thoughts. Is he going crazy? It's a cool idea, and it's cool to discover that as a matter of fact he is not going crazy; a corporation has developed a shampoo that allows operatives to use people's brain for communicating and receiving, meaning you can see what is happening in someone's life and comment on it through a microphone that broadcasts into their brain.That's awesome, but here's the problem: why is the guy on the microphone telling the protagonist his girlfriend is cheating on him and other paranoid thoughts? He's not a sadist, so he's not just doing it to be mean. Presumably this is his job. But it appears that the shampoos purpose is actually for mind control, to convince people to buy certain products or vote certain ways, so how is this goal achieved? The filmmakers seem to have liked the idea of someone broadcasting paranoid thoughts into someone else's brain to the point where they didn't care if it made any sense in terms of the story, and that annoyed me. But I still thought it was a cool movie.

This film certainly is grim and grimy to look at but it is interesting and I consider that high praise. It reminds me a bit of Red Spectacles in which Mamoru Oshii has all of his film in black and white with a good film noir look, except for the spectacles, which are of doubtful utility and doubtful provenance. In this film the femme fatal is colorful and most of the rest of the crowded herd is as bland as the scenery.What is missing here is motivation for the grand sweep of the underlying conspiracy. Like Douglas Adams wrote, "Was it just some bug eyed monster trying to take over the universe for no very good reason." In this case our hero seeks to find out why he is malcontent and why he hears voices and finds answers to both but no real solutions and this is unfortunate, because while his problems are his own the portrayed conspiratorial play has no clear purpose, unless it's just to take over the world to make money, but that is a tired and threadbare plot played out in Washington every day. Ho hum.But his search and his Orphic trek through the underworld of a Future Europe is interesting and worth looking at. It is also interesting as a computer graphic style using live actors and reprocessing them, apparently, to cartoon proportions. This is something you get used to soon enough and so has no obvious reason, except that it is kind of neat. Perhaps I missed something.