Repo! The Genetic Opera

Repo! The Genetic Opera

Rating (from metacritic.com): 32/100

Storyline (from IMDB.com):
In the year 2056 - the not so distant future - an epidemic of organ failures devastates the planet. Out of the tragedy, a savior emerges: GeneCo, a biotech company that offers organ transplants, for a price. Those who miss their payments are scheduled for repossession and hunted by villainous Repo Men. In a world where surgery addicts are hooked on painkilling drugs and murder is sanctioned by law, a sheltered young girl searches for the cure to her own rare disease as well as information about her family's mysterious history. After being sucked into the haunting world of GeneCo, she is unable to turn back, as all of her questions will be answered at the wildly anticipated spectacular event: The Genetic Opera.
Written by Lionsgate

Source: Netflix

Review:
Welcome to my humble review of Repo! The Genetic Opera. Now, in case you weren’t aware, Repo is in fact a rock opera, something I have never experienced before. Hell, I haven’t even seen a normal opera, so this was quite the education. I like musicals, so I was able to keep up with the movie, but to see an opera, where almost every line is sung was totally different. I have to say, I’m not sure if I’m a fan.

I was told about this movie by some friends who had really enjoyed it. They said that it was better than it looked and was worth a shot. When I made my Netflix account earlier this year, (yes, I know I’m behind the times) I added it to my queue. Time passed and it finally arrived in my mailbox. I have vague memories of seeing ads for it when it was out, and read a review in a local paper, but I remembered next to nothing about it. I was a clean slate. Which is the perfect state to view a movie like this. From what I gathered, it was an experiment. Did it succeed? Let’s find out.

Starting with the opening; done in a comic book style, it really sets the stage for our trip to the world of Repo! Over the top, exaggerated, and outlandish. Yeah, this is going to be fun. Once the background is done, we start to see what this world really looks like. I have to say, I enjoyed the outfits, the pure grandiose Techno-Goth look. The sets also give you a sense of a world left to rot, outside the ivory towers of GeneCo. Inside GeneCo, however, we find a dark, sterile world where nothing seems to be affected by age. I liked seeing this, showing that the haves and have-nots lived totally different lives. It felt very cyberpunk, which I’m a fan of. However, the movie was a bit of a gore-fest and about ten minutes in, we see a hole in a wall made by ramming a corpse into it (before you start to think about it, no that can’t work), and we piles upon piles of bodies. While not very squeamish, this started my guts rolling. Minutes earlier, we saw a woman get her heart removed in a graphic fashion, so I took a bit of a break then came back to the movie.

As the movie moves on, we see more gore, and pointless death. Mind you, I’m not complaining, but I’m not a fan of horror or gore and our director had just come off from doing Saw 3, so I guess he was still in that mindset. I think it was the singing combined with gruesome death that jarred me, much like my reaction to Sweeny Todd. Unlike most horror movies, the deaths weren’t completely pointless. It very powerfully showed just how little life was valued in this dystopian future, where you can have your organs repossessed.

I do have to comment that the actors did a very good job in presenting their characters. However, their job was made much easier because very few of the characters had depth or were more complex than a jar of mayonnaise. To start with, we have the Largo family; a super rich and powerful family, led by a powerful man. Paul Sorvino nails this part, but this character is something seen in most fiction. To play the cliché all the way into the grave, we have his children who have worked for nothing and have free rein to be crazy. The oldest is a violent psychopath, the other brother a vain, psychotic man and the daughter is an attention whore who gets whatever she wants. The fact that she’s played by Paris Hilton only added to the fit of giggles I had when I saw her for the first time. However, I must say she did a good job, and her performance did add to the film. With a wig and makeup, I didn’t realize it was her for a good amount of time. The real lead, Shilo, played by Alexa Vega was again done fairly well, but how hard is it to play the ‘girl trapped in the tower/castle/laboratory’? I was surprised to see Anthony Stewart Head as Dr. Wallace, but he did a good job. He really had two characters: Dr. Wallace and Mr. Repo Man, which I noticed right away, but he showed with his voice, face and whole body how the loving father of Nathan could become the butcher Repo Man, who seemed to enjoy his work. I’m not knocking the actors, they did an amazing job, but the script left a bit to be desired.

I’ve seen some people complain about the music, but I feel this is where the movie was the best. The songs were very well done, and advanced the story without being too annoying or repetitive. I keep finding myself humming Paris Hilton’s parts of Grave Robber, and I don’t know why. If you want to do a musical or an opera, you have to start with the music, and the creators really did. While I wouldn’t buy this movie, I am thinking about picking up the soundtrack.

There were quite a few things that I just caught myself thinking about, because they didn’t make sense to me. For example, the company sells the organs, right? And, they want to make their money, right? So, why kill people who can’t pay up? Ask your friendly neighborhood loan shark, and he’ll tell you this basic principle of the business: dead people don’t pay. If someone doesn’t pay, you might mess up his face, so he remembers what he owes. Some groups, like the Russians, will kill members of your family to get you to pay. Only after it looks like it’s going to cost them more to get the money from you than you owe, will they kill you. If they’re being logical, and organized crime isn’t exactly the most logical profession, but still. I think if I were in charge of GeneCo, and heaven help you all should I ever get that powerful, I’d have slave labor camps where you ‘work off’ what you owe. Free labor is better than a dead body, in my book. If they said something about being able to harvest and use the other organs, or something, anything, I wouldn’t have had an issue. As a plot device, it was very effective in showing how cheap life was, and turned up the gore factor, but it just didn’t do anything else for me.

One of the other things that bothered me was the painkiller they talk about, Zydrate. In the beginning of the film, they touch on it briefly, talking about how people are addicted and how the ‘street’ version is made from the dead. Well now, this sounds like a subplot I can get behind. You like that idea, huh? Were you like me, thinking that both the legal and street versions were made from the dead? Or, maybe from the fake organs GeneCo makes? If you were like me, you were disappointed when they totally skipped this plot. It was like a tooth that’s about to fall out, and you can’t stop running your tongue over it, making it hurt and thinking about what the Tooth Fairy will give you when it finally drops. You keep thinking about, hoping they’ll talk about it whenever it comes up, but no. Add to this that one of the characters ‘makes’ it by shoving a needle up a corpse’s nose and extracts some glowing blue liquid. That’s it. My knowledge of medical science may not be the best, but there’s something fishy about this. I would think that it’d be common knowledge that if you shove a needle up a nose of a dead guy, you get magical blue Heroin. Come on people, at least give me a reason for this. I don’t care if it’s some bullshit reason like ‘oh, it never really leaves your system when they inject you with it.’ It may be stupid, but sometimes something stupid is better than nothing.

The last thing that started to bug me was the plastic surgery as fashion. Don’t get me wrong, it’s happening now, so I can only imagine how bad it would get in this fucked up future. The issue is a small one, why is GeneCo doing plastic surgery? Don’t they sell organs? I get things like eyes being fashionable, but the rest just doesn’t jive. Add to that the fact that the writers don’t seem to understand the difference between genes and plastic surgery, just makes me annoyed.

In the end, we got an experiment. A rock opera for horror and metal fans, trying to appeal to other nerds. They wanted to be the next Rocky Horror. And they failed. I feel like it tried too hard to be too many things, losing its focus and didn’t seem to care about ‘minor details.’ That said, however, I would watch it again. It was a bad movie, but I could still enjoy the music. If you have a friend with a copy, have them loan it to you.

Final Thoughts: It just tried too hard. I would have read the hell out of a comic of this, however.

It was a BAD movie.