2 hours in and nobody's been terrorized by a giant insect... Honey... I shrunk the Trakt score
Okay. Here's the thing. This movie was not well represented by its trailer. This takes much more from "This Crowded Earth" by Robert Bloch than I was expecting. The amount of "Morris the Explainer" scenes with Matt Damon is absolutely mind blowing and for a comedy, it doesn't really work. It is an semi-interesting think piece that I will be interested to see if I am still thinking about this tomorrow morning. Redefines bland despite a flashy concept. 6/10
I genuinely enjoyed this film. Especially the thai lady. She's very good with accents.
What a great Movie. Finally a really good movie outside the mainstream. The imminent demise of humanity is not so outlandish and makes the movie feel more intense. I like it much.
DO NOT WASTE YOUR TIME ON THIS, I REPEAT, DO NOT WASTE YOUR TIME! Besides the fact that the trailers were very misleading, this is the worst role I have seen Matt Damon play in years.
The trailers made this movie look like a comedy, which it's totally not.
But overall I enjoyed it.
I thoroughly enjoyed this film. It was quirky, fantastic (as in full of fantasy), funny, moving, profound, whimsical and all round good entertainment. Matt Damon excels in this sort of ComiDrama. Hong Chau is a breath of fresh air (deserving of her award nominations). I look forward to see to seeing this again when it comes to DVD. I give it an 8.5 (thoroughly enjoyable) out of 10. [Comedic SciFi Drama].
This is one of the worst movies I've seen in a long time. I thought the idea (from the trailer) was interesting and was excited to see this, but it was a huge letdown.
This high concept drama seemed extremely promising, and did start off relatively well, but by the midway point and beyond, things started to drift about aimlessly. I went from invested in the concept and the impacts it would have on life and society to bored, disinterested, and just waiting for the end (which takes too long to get to). Some of the comedy is just...weird and doesn't seem to fit. There seem tobe themes about being in the moment, anti-consumerism, and environmentalism...but there isn't any cohesive message. I feel bad that such a great premise ended up as wasted as it was.
Completely disappointed. Expected fun comedy about small people problems :D - this is what trailer led us to believe! BUT this is NOT a comedy, and being small doesn't even matter for most of the movie.
It might not be such as bad movie for someone who wanted to see thought provoking movie about climate change and one mans personal journey. But when you want something light and fun after long day - THIS ISN'T IT.
Great concept and quite watchable movie
Original and quite funny when Ngoc Lan Tran appears :)
this is good movie
in the
interesting premise, poor execution.
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2 hours and 15 minutes for this ?!?!
What a waste of time !!
It’s an interesting premise but really missed on execution. Spent far too much time getting there then wallowing in pity then on redeeming himself through others. Should have been about downsizing and not getting rich and the moral ambiguity.
Social commentary = not in the mood. I was looking for a comedic quip on the perils of being a shrunken middle-aged American in a world where small is new and good. Instead this movie drags itself forward (not Sideways) with bizarre intent - what what what!?
This is an honest, transparent look into the business of movies: the trailer IS NOT the movie but if they can sucker you to pay then they have won.
A rather dull film in my opinion. The whole story could have been told within an hour, but they dragged it out for a full two hours. The editor and director should learn that less is more. They should learn the art of downsizing.
Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of this film is that the actors were all excellent and very believable, and they definitely played some strong characters. The music was also fantastic as well. Therefore, if the writing was better, they could have easily made a decent film. Sadly this story was far too boring to be a decent film. It was predictable at times, which I don't mind at all, but when you add predictable and boring together, there is definitely no justification for even making this film. Two hours of my life I will never get back. Watch Tom Thumb instead!
Great cast and an interesting premise. Having seen the negativity surrounding the film and poor reviews I was somewhat sceptical going in. Converse to popular opinion, I actually very much enjoyed Downsizing. Whilst it did feel like the story tried to take too many directions I actually saw this as somewhat of a positive as it felt quite fresh in that regard. Completely non-linear. I was expecting a light hearted, “oh look at this tiny man surrounded by the big world” and be bored of the comedic tropes quickly, but instead it’s a wonderfully human story. Yes, it could have been better in its writing overall, but a solid 7/10 still. I’d watch again.
When you watch the trailer it looks like a cute movie, until you realize the trailer is a bait and switch. Jason Sudeikis looks like he has a larger role in this movie if you believe the trailer, but it's really about 5 minutes and equates to a cameo. The first half is so-so, but the second half is pretty slow and boring with a stupid ending that was seemingly changed to something a bit agenda driven because I can't imagine this was the original ending.
The best parts of this movie are in the trailers, everything else is pretty boring.
And don't look to this for any type of consistency, as we're told they can only shrink living organic matter, yet there are tiny TV's, tiny cars, tiny EVERYTHING that has to be manufactured, so how in the world could all of this possibly be there unless there's a mining and production operation - in which case what benefit is there to going small? Lots of plot holes.
But the ending, it's a doozy and totally out of whack for the general theme of the movie.
So I'm gonna have a different take on this. Others seemed to have hated it. I loved it. It's slow, calm & meaningful. This man, who can never catch a break in life, big or small, finally finds love in a dying world. Poetic! I loved all the characters except not Dusan so much; never could get a steady read on him. The cameo appearances mentioned by others were just that for me. Those characters could've been nobodies & nothing would've changed. They weren't real pieces of the story anyway! What matters is taking this life journey with this almost invisible down-on-his-luck guy. And watching him finally get a "win," regardless of the circumstances.
A film with big aspirations but all with little consequence. Certainly not a comedy, but it's ill fitting within other genres. Drama? Romance? Sci-fi? A little bit of all, but nothing really rings true. I did enjoy the film, I realise it was trying to make political and ecological points, but I was a little underwhelmed. Alexander Payne has made some tremendous films, but this is small fry in comparison.
I loved seeing all the large items, which gave it a honey i shrunk the kids kind of feel, but for me there wasn't enough of that. The story took an unexpected turn halfway through. Was enjoyable but not how I imagined.
I watched the film because I thought the whole downsizing thing looked fun, but honestly, it felt really long and uninteresting and the story had no point and hardly made any sense. Unless you'd want to waste 2 hours, I wouldn't recommend this film.
And here I thought Jupiter Ascending was as retarded as a real movie could be. This one is a crime against humanity.
An extremely interesting premise with a kind of poor execution. The trailers sold a completely different movie. This isn't the wacky high-concept comedy you're expecting. It's more of a sombre, and dark existential crisis of a film, with an ending that will leave most scratching their heads. They play with some cool ideas though.
Downsizing is one of those movies that comes not as advertised. All the promotional material of Downsizing implies a comedy, while what you get is barely more than a dry drama.
Imagine you sat down with a friend, and started trying to come up with a list of issues if you could shrink people down to a tiny fraction of their original size.
Now imagine you made a movie where you just introduced everything on that list, with no depth towards any of the thoughts, and then strapped it to a weird coming of middle-age story.
Downsizing ends up missing on all the ideas it tries to introduce, and concludes as a boring, shallow, love story with no resolution.
Not a bad Movie per se but it just didn't take off. The Plot was quite interesting but the pace was just to slow and it was altogether to predictable. Matt Damon played his Role good like usual, it just wasn't a interesting one.
It started so good. I thoroughly enjoyed the first 45-60 minutes, and thought the concept was brilliant. So much more could have been made of the size. The character of Ngoc was bizarre and almost beyond comedy, veering into stupidity.
This intentionally mis-marketed art film has a lot it wants to say, it just has no idea how to say it.
Interesting concept but this is more of a soft sci-fi than a comedy. The first two acts were pretty interesting but the third act fell flat. Owen Wilson has ruined the word "Wow" for me because every time Matt Damon says it I instantly thought of Owen Wilson. Otherwise Matt Damon was fine. He needs to go back to action or start picking better roles; this, Suburbicon and the Great Wall are not great. Christoph Waltz and Udo Kier were both good. Hong Chau's did a great job but I really hated her character.
And what a waste of Neil Patrick Harris, Laura Dern and Jason Sudeikis!
For me, this movie was really hard to rate, because starting with the idea, this movie has a great surreal premises, that fancied me right from the beginning. Seeing the first trailer I was excited because the idea seems absolutely great and crazy, but I had no idea, what direction this movie would take. Seeing the second trailer, however, I was pretty pissed, because crucial story elements are spoiled right away and you get to understand where this movie would probably end up.
Still, the movie has some great ideas, and I liked how it formulates it social criticism; e.g. the people can downsize and by doing so have a great impact on nature and saving the planet, so actively and positively impacting the far future of everyone. Still, by doing so, they also get out of the social system, because their contribution to society also shrinks. And therefore people who decide to not downsize and by choice stay in their position that are already bad, they start hating those who strive to better their own situation as well as the overall future situation of the world in general. And this is something pretty common, whenever change is involved. But that is not the only criticism you’ll find. E.g. we have the problem of dictatorships touched, that are legitimized by us as we still maintain good relationships with these countries, we have the tendency of human being to use anything as a weapon to inflict pain to others. We have the criticism of humans always inflicting systems that segregate us from „others“. Even in a paradisaical place like the shrunk community, where everyone could be filthy rich, we have people seeking personal profit and (in a way) power over others, and segregating those less fortunate into slums - people have the tendency to turn even paradise into hell. And topics like world overpopulation, illegal immigration, etc. are also briefly touched. It even gets philosophical while staring at human annihilation.
So, this actually should be a great movie. But that’s the problem - the creators chose to make a movie, and as a movie this piece of art has a number of shortcomings. Mainly that it has no direction in it’s story telling at all. You feel like our main character is thrown from one situation into the next. These situation are even hardly connected to each other - and never is there a visible story line. So in the end, you keep wondering what is actually happening, and why and how did we get there? This is one of the problems I had with this movie. The other is, that the end was one of the most unsatisfying I’ve seen in a while. I mean, yes, we where presented with some social and global problems, but in the end, what did I learn by watching this movie? I don’t feel like there was any contribution to me personally, there where no new thought processes induced, there wasn’t any answer offered. Nothing. The end feels like it really isn’t an end at all - they just all of a sudden stopped the movie, not at a climax, not a cliffhanger, it isn’t shocking, it isn’t happy, it isn’t sad. It’s just over, unexpected and the first question you ask yourself afterwards is: Why did I watch this.
Because, besides it’s lack of storytelling, there is also hardly anything else this movie has to offer. Acting wise we have Hong Chau, and she is the bomb, she steels the show of everyone with her energy, her charisma, her demanding nature. She makes this movie worth watching. Matt Damon, the main star is interchangeable, Christoph Waltz is as we expect him to be, but nowhere near his high performance that we loved in movies like Django Unchained or Inglorious Bastards. And all the other roles are actually pretty insignificant. Kirsten Wiig doesn’t have many lines and is a story device but that’s it. Udo Kier is nothing more than Christoph Waltz’ sidekick, Neil Patrick Harris actually has a 5 Minutes role, same with Laura Dern, Jason Sudeikis, etc. And each role is pretty mediocre and could have been played by any actor with the same performance. Nothing outstanding here. Soundtrack? Well it has this caching theme from the trailer, but that’s it. Stunning pictures? Nope. Special Effects? Nope. You would actually think, that in a movie where people are shrunk you would encounter some interesting situations where the director had to introduce some clever, some never-before-seen techniques but no - after Matt Damon’s Character enters the shrunk society there is nothing to remind us of this fact, other than a pretty blunt reference to a real rose in his house, or the giant vodka bottle.
So in the end, what do we have? A courageous new idea of how to tackle our world problems, some great critical views on our society, which are then turned into the self finding trip of one man in a wonderful new world that isn’t wonderful or new at all. We have a story that feels random, we see some great actors in mediocre rolls, there is nothing interesting to experience cinematographic-wise, and we are left with the feeling of having wasted some time.
Why does it still get such a high rating from me? Well for it’s great premises, as well as for Hong Chau - the only actress that managed to connect with you emotionally and made you both, happy and sad. A great performance and so much energy, which actually makes this movie worth seeing, even if it isn’t a good movie.
An interesting idea wasted on a boring story that has no clear direction.
Is it drama? Comedy? Satire ? Romance ? It is all and neither.
You should have sympathy for Paul Safranek after what happened to him, yet he is written and portrayed in a way that you couldn't care less. I liked Dusan and Joris a lot more. Turning the cheerful first downsizers into a doomsday cult, and thereby turning what was supposed to be a solution to extinction into an act of desperation, to me, says resignation. There is nothing we can do, it is already past midnight. The whole movie seems to relate that message as you can clearly see that the small community deals with the same social issues of the haves and have-nots then the big ones. And so all you can do is accept your fate and maybe try to ease your concience by doing some little things.
At least that's what I got out of this.
Not really sure what I was expecting from this to be honest, the trailer made it look quite funny but whilst it’s funny in places it has a much more serious story. Sadly it felt like the dragged the movie out too much at over 2 hours it does get quite slow in places.
This was a confuse movie for me. I didn't get the end.
I really enjoy Ngoc Lan. She was funny, badass, and with a good heart.
Paul was a mess but also a good person.
This film had great aspirations but could neither rise to the occasion or live up to our expectations. In trying to be a comedy, a satire, a sociological study and a treatise on ecology, it ended up falling very short.
please don't watch this
I knew it was poorly received and that it bombed at the box office so I had low expectations. What a pleasant surprise it turned out.
The first act is great. I was intrigued and invested in the concept. The pace of the second act, with the depressed divorcee starts to drag but it picks up when Matt Damon starts helping the Vietnamese lady.
Cool concept that goes downhill terrible fast and way overstays its welcome. Is it sci-fi? Is it a drama? Is it a comedy? I am still unsure after two watches and the cast is far too good to be this disappointing.
Rating: 0.5/5 - 50% - Skip
This movie is idiotic. So many gaping plot holes with no attempt to explain anything. Several times in the movies I was left wondering what was supposed to have happened, what's going on, and why the characters are where they are or acting as they are. One of the movies with the greatest potential but the dumbest execution.
.Good cast, interesting premise, yet somehow turned out terrible. Entire movie is simply boring. Unique in that I couldn't make a spoiler if I wanted to, because not a single interesting thing actually happened in it, and even ending feels like an empty filler scene. I think it tries to be deep, but can't say for sure, because I don't see it.
The movie was an easy watch and OK, but Hong Chau really stole the show.
I agree with the other comments. See the trailer and you expect some wacky, Honey I Shrunk The Adults type shtick, but what you get instead is a rather thoughtful, dystopian scifi story. I imagine the studio cut the trailer to maximise appeal/takings, which is a shame, as it's probably a better film than the goofy trailer made it seem.
This is one of those movies where the trailer is better than the film itself. The first 45 minutes or so was quirky, interesting, fun.... and then the story completely decided "Yeah, we gave you enough. now let's show you this dude meandering through life." 95 percent of the second half did not even matter that it took place in this "sci-fi" world... it was a story that could have been told in freakin modern day california and only maybe a few scenes tweaked. There was a great movie somewhere in here, but they decided to change gears and go another route. A bad, bland and pretty pointless route that was completely unnecessary. What a waste of a creative idea.
There were so many little ingenious things in this movie that you were supposed to be yelling touché, But you found that even you try so hard to love them, say the Vietnamese Female main, you just don't have that kind of heart.
You know what I recommend you do with your time instead of watching this? Take a fucking nap. This slug moves at the pace of a boring four hour epic you'd see from sixty years ago, yet it's run-time is miraculously only two hours and fifteen painful, agonizing, and traumatic minutes. You think this movie is a comedy? Fuck no. This is just another in a long line of pretentious "arthouse?" movies being falsely advertised to a general audience, only for it to backfire and cause terrible word of mouth/poor critical reception. I half-knew what I was getting into based on what I heard from initial viewings, but I still went in with the expectations I was going to see a drama with some comedy elements.
So, you may be asking, well hell, if this movie isn't a comedy, what is Downsizing all about? Here you go: immigration. Yup, that's it. Wow, how original. That hasn't been done already in a ton of other worthless indie projects in the past year. That's totally not wasting this interesting concept. Matt Damon has to star in another misleading political propaganda piece that has no a single aspect, story or technical, going for it. It's really a shame. Downsizing now finds itself in the ranks of other classics of 2017 like The Snowman and Gerald's Game, all with fantastic concepts and genuinely great things going for them, but fall flat on their face for just a few mis-steps. The first half-hour of this promises a fun and engaging satirical look at our current world with the introduction of a "solution" to man-kind's problems and jabs at popular culture. (The Leisure Land place is themed a lot like Disneyland, for example) There are good sequences here and there scattered mainly in the first half, but the movie, like, immediately changes it's interest from being about little people, and more about being a metaphor for America and immigrants. The second Damon arrives at an apartment complex that looks like a shitty Mexican place, topped off with graffiti and Spanish programming playing on a television, I felt like busting out laughing. Call me racist all you want, but holy lord, was this just hilarious, the mental gymnastics Alexander Payne was doing when writing this to justify some of this shit.
You might comment and say I'm just not getting or I hate it because of it's message, trust me, I'm not. I hate this movie because the fact they took this direction. I hate that they wasted such good potential with this. My father was actually looking forward to this and he thought this looked like an interesting comedy, but no, I'm going to have to tell him just a colossal trainwreck it actually is. I'm done. I'm not writing anymore about this. I need to stop going to see bad movies, but how?
"A movie overwhelmed by its own ecological and human implications."
I went into the movie thinking it would have way more comedy and focus more on the downsizing part, and I came out of it bored out of my skull.
Interesting concept ruined by fantastical political commentary.
I didn't even finish the last 30 minutes of the film. It was really boring for such a (well what you'd think to be such a) interesting concept... also the acting and apparent 'romance' made me kind of uncomfortable too.
For me it is the worst movie with Matt Damon...
The movie is boring and a waste of time.
If you plan on watching it, save your time and watch soemthing else.
Only good thing is that it draws attention to climatic change and the pollution we produce.
The trailer made it seem like this is a pure comedy flick, it sold a completely different movie. So I was pretty disappointed... It's also a tad too long for my liking, wasn't enough story to fill more than 2 hours
I’m not sure I fully understood what the movie was trying to say
It seemed comical then serious with mixed messaging. The ultimate in poor communication between husband and wife though yeah! He gets reduced in size, she ditches and heads home with one eyebrow missing.
I enjoyed part of the movie, after a slow beginning the mid section was entertaining whilst the ending, well it’s odd!
Technically, a very well done movie; small looks believable . Personally it’s an interesting concept and it’s made to sound very appealing. Who wouldn’t be tempted by the offer of living a pampered existence usually well out of grasp.
Was really excited to see this film. When I saw it, I hated it. It was good for the first 30 minutes. But when that annoying stereotype walks on screen, the film just falls apart. Definitely not a good film in my eyes.
Shout by lotus_blossomBlockedParentSpoilers2018-01-04T05:13:03Z
This movie seems confused and wandering without a point or real story. First we are downsizing to save the planet. But they make a point of letting us know it is economically unviable. Ok, so actually we are doing it to save money and live like kings. But it is so horrible it is the new form of genocide and oppression. But wait! It turns out there is a benefit to being small and if the small people go into a bunker we can save the human race, but nah forget the human race because you got a girlfriend. So the point is….