Metropia [Movie (animation) review]

[Post published by Liviu, on Liviu's [Personal] Blog]


Anim'est [official site] again, of course. I've chosen to watch the apparently creepy Metropia [official site; IMDB; cinemagia in Romanian; google search].


Dark images, shades of gray...?

Well, I'm kind of bad at naming colors, but it seems there are mostly shades of gray whatever, everything's very dark etc. - well, it goes perfect with the tone of the movie, i.e. the pessimistic & sad world [story] that the movie envisions etc. We do get some colors from now and then, but rarely.

I'm gonna be nasty about this: since it's a cooperation Sweden + Denmark + Norway + Finland, maybe the dark images make sense after all - in many parts of Scandinavia / Northern countries [en.wikipedia] they get little light (therefore a lot of dark)
=> Examples of worst day lengths:

• Stockholm: November, December (the day lasts only 6 h), January
• Copenhagen: December, January
• Oslo: November, December (a bit under 6 hours), January
• Helsinki: November, December (again, a bit under 6 hours), January

... now think those are the day lengths computed as the difference between sunrise and sunset, therefore that does not mean sunlight :) Now count in the clouds and/or rain due to the proximity of the ocean all around... (OK-OK, they call them seas: Baltic Sea, North Sea, Norwegian Sea, Barents Sea - I see them as the ocean, since they're not clearly trapped.)



The story? What's with the voices inside the guy's head? What about the woman in the trailer? The conspiracy? Does he win?

The story stops somewhat halfway between complicated and straightforward; it develops nicely and coherent; ok, maybe it's 60% complicated and 40% straightforward, I don't know.

We do get (doh!) an European-pessimistic approach/style overall. Could it have been otherwise?! :))

At times, the atmosphere feels like in 1984 [IMDB] or Equilibrium [IMDB], i.e. some overwhelming tension all around in the air pressing on everything & everyone although one has no clear idea where it comes from.


Spoiler: Indeed, the sexy woman (Nina) manipulates the normal-dumb-Roger-guy and everyone else so to get her father killed. Why? Well, he was the main stockholder of Trexx, i.e. the company running Europe's underground web of transportation. Also, Trexx developed the technology for manipulating people by speaking in their heads (I'm not telling you how the shampoo worked :p). So, she can inherit all now: the transportation web, and the shampoo technology-for-speaking-into-people's-heads since Roger only blew up the Scandinavian floor of the manipulation headquarters, but they did not destroy the shampoo factory when she has shown it to him.

So, we get kind of half of a happy end, which I consider a huge breakthrough given the European pleasure for breaking/crushing destinies in movies etc. I still am surprised they didn't eventually crush Roger... - do they plan on making a sequel? :D


Overall, a fresh approach I'd say; I find it encouraging to see Europeans pull off an animation like this. It's not Pixar or Dreamworks, of course, but it works. It could have made it into mainstream, people might have liked it.

Definitely an animation for adults - it doesn't have anything to entertain children.
I joked on it, yes, but the subject is serious.



Conclusions

Metropia - good story, indeed, but the European-pessimistic approach/style prevails (which I say it's bad). It would have been fair for Metropia to make it into mainstream - some adults would have enjoyed it; children couldn't and wouldn't have understood it.