Self/less
A nice little morality tale, with some technobabble transhumanism and action scenes. Not as visually stunning as other Tarsem Singh films, bummer. Technically great, I guess I just fundamentally disagree with the premise.
Our protagonist is a real estate developer with a crazy Brooklyn accent. He lives in Trump Tower, from what I can tell, a gold plated penthouse overlooking Central Park. The establishing character moment is a fancy lunch where a young whippersnapper is invited there to let him know his deal is being taken over by our protagonist.
This petty act of revenge happens even though he will be dead in six months from cancer, and his second in command is mourning his dead child. I guess billionaires that do this kind of thing are beyond redemption, but that’s not what David and Alex Pastor think.
After another trip to the hospital, he’s had it, and pays the quarter million bucks to a young Rasputin with a sub-rosa operation to transfer the minds between bodies. He’s informed the target body is a vat grown human popsicle.
After extensive physical therapy and training, he’s basically young again, and can be released into the world, in this case New Orleans. He’s still a billionaire, so he just plays pick-up basketball games, parties hard, and fucks hundreds of woman.
There’s only a catch: he needs pills to keep his sanity and avoid flashbacks of Afghanistan, horses, and a little sick girl. On a lark, and when Google’s search engine supported operators instead of machine learning mush, he finds the specific location of his flashbacks.
When I said “released”, it’s more a golden cage. He has minders follow him everywhere, but he loses them to visit the house where the woman is there, and breaks down when her dead husband appears before her. He doesn’t break her illusion directly, keeps hedging his bets for a while, another sign of his billionaire sociopathy showing.
The minders catch up to them, and are willing to burn everything down to recover him. Would you see that, the chief minder is the pickup basketball dude he befriended. His body’s military training rises up and he freaking kills them all, escaping with the woman.
They pick up the kid, but eventually he comes clean, and mentions he’s not really her husband. She’s stunned, but some dudes burn her house down, she’s stuck with him. They go find the only help they have, his old second in command.
Turns out that second in command cloned his son first! He was the one that recommended him in the first place. So it seems he’s helping, but he sold them out. He doesn’t even know that Soylent Green is people, I mean, his new child was taken from other parents.
The woman and child are taken to the compound, so our protagonist can have a final showdown, burn up the doctor, and ship them to Caribbean with his offshore bank account. He’s got his final redemption arc to cross: meet his daughter and tell her how pride was he of her by heading a an organisation contrary to his real estate interests.
Finally, he quits the drugs cold turkey and the original “dead” guy remains, free to chill with his family and all that money.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.