A nice idea gone awfully wrong. The first 20 minutes are actually quite good: the art design is worthy of all the prizes you could award it, and the director builds a growing tension that keeps you interested, although you already know, from the first five minutes, that the likely outcome is that everything will fall apart, since "the building" is clearly a metaphor for "modern" society.
However, even predictable plots can be interesting, and initially this seems to be the case.
Then, the film loses its grip and very quickly becomes an endless repetition of chaos. By the 30min mark the director has made his point: society sucks and if things continue as they are, we will all descend into primitive behaviour and act like barbarians. Nothing wrong with that message per se, but the film gets stuck on it like a broken record and treats the audience to an endless stream of pointless violence, mindless sex orgies, rapes, more violence, looting, social chaos, still more violence. It's like beating a dead horse and then continuing to beat it until you are beating the skeleton of a dead horse (and you continue beating it).
It seems that the writer and director were so in love with the core message that they could not quite get around to developing it and finishing it properly.
I saw this at a cinema in London; some people left half-way into it (most seats were empty anyway). I managed to sit through the whole thing, hoping that the movie would redeem itself towards the end; it only got worse. This might be at the top of my "worst films of all time" list.
The acting is not bad, the cast is good, and the art design is still deserving awards; but the overall result is just appalling. It would have made a great short film, if they stopped it at 30 minutes. The way it was released, at 119 minutes, it is 90 minutes too long.
However, even predictable plots can be interesting, and initially this seems to be the case.
Then, the film loses its grip and very quickly becomes an endless repetition of chaos. By the 30min mark the director has made his point: society sucks and if things continue as they are, we will all descend into primitive behaviour and act like barbarians. Nothing wrong with that message per se, but the film gets stuck on it like a broken record and treats the audience to an endless stream of pointless violence, mindless sex orgies, rapes, more violence, looting, social chaos, still more violence. It's like beating a dead horse and then continuing to beat it until you are beating the skeleton of a dead horse (and you continue beating it).
It seems that the writer and director were so in love with the core message that they could not quite get around to developing it and finishing it properly.
I saw this at a cinema in London; some people left half-way into it (most seats were empty anyway). I managed to sit through the whole thing, hoping that the movie would redeem itself towards the end; it only got worse. This might be at the top of my "worst films of all time" list.
The acting is not bad, the cast is good, and the art design is still deserving awards; but the overall result is just appalling. It would have made a great short film, if they stopped it at 30 minutes. The way it was released, at 119 minutes, it is 90 minutes too long.