The film is completely dystopian

Jean 2022-03-28 09:01:07

The film is adapted from the British novelist J.G. Ballard's novel of the same name. The original novel was published in 1975. "Skyscrapers" is his response to the irrational urban planning after the war. The prototype of the building designer Royer (Jeremy Irons) in the novel is the most famous architect of the 20th century, the urban planner Le Corbusier and his followers. The plot of the film is this: in the 1970s, class struggle and violence among the residents of an isolated high-rise apartment. This high-end apartment has 40 floors with more than 2,000 independent suites, supermarkets, swimming pools, primary schools and other living facilities. All floors are connected by high-speed elevators, forming a small society that is completely independent of the outside world. However, this seemingly perfect world is extremely fragile. A small power outage and trivial neighborhood disputes can trigger conflict. As the conflict continues to escalate, the people in the building are divided into three camps: the lower-class residents living on the ground floor. , the middle class living in the middle, and the wealthy with high-rise luxury apartments. Residents of different camps began to violently confront each other for limited public resources. The rules of the civilized world no longer apply here, and the laws of the jungle are replaced. Even just in the past few years, there have been many films about wealth inequality. Just as in Bong Joon-ho's "Snowpiercer", the lower classes attack the pampered first-class carriages, the buildings in "High-rise" are far more metaphorical than they are for the plot. But in a world where class differences are so well known, the real question is what do you do when you are neither struggling for survival nor enjoying luxury, in other words, when you are a comfortable middle class? Robert represents that kind of person, and the dilemma they find themselves in. But the film refuses to provide an answer to that question. At the end of the film, the dystopian thought is expressed through a broadcast narration: there is only one system in the world, capitalism, and the difference is only whether capital belongs to the state or the people.

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Extended Reading
  • Kaylie 2022-04-24 07:01:17

    It's bad, bad, bad, bad in every way, the metaphor is good, satirizes capitalism, high society, but the filming is too bad. Nothing compares to Snowpiercer. 4 points.

  • Constantin 2022-03-19 09:01:06

    The foreplay was too long. The Che Guevara poster on the wall always hinted at riots and revolutions. The latter part was confiscated and used false violence as packaging. In fact, it is still too literary and not wild enough. Europeans will not after all. To play with such dirty themes, you can only use sex and confusion as gimmicks to make up for the various shortcomings of the story. This should be learned from Koreans, and even some American dramas can be taken out of a few episodes.

High-Rise quotes

  • Laing: [on Wilder] He's probably the sanest man in the building.

  • Richard Wilder: Doesn't it seem odd, Laing? That a man can fall from the thirty-ninth floor, and not one police car turn up? Where's the investigation, Laing? I mean, where's the sirens? Laing!