First of all, I'll say that I've definitely seen worse. This is not a full-blown silver screen flick, but at the same time it's better than most of the old SciFi Channel movie-of-the-week productions. The acting is decent and the story /mostly/ flows (more on that below). I'd file this as the equivalent of a decent TV movie or a theater-released B-movie. Casting a Rick Perry look-alike as the no-party-named Governor of Texas was a cute move (and the irony of the Governor of Texas bragging about first-in-the-nation schools was also amusing).
I could go on a rant about some of the overdone tropes in the movie (faceless mooks, corrupt government, incompetent security planning, lousy math, apparently-overly-elaborate procedures, etc.) but (1) those points have mostly been hit on in other reviews and (2) I can allow for a certain amount of that in a movie like this. It was easy enough to connect the dots on why a lot of what was going on was going on.
However, (SPOILER ALERT) what killed it for me (pardon the phrasing) was the end-of-film twist. Basically, the plot until the end is best summed up as this: In response to his girlfriend failing the test last year and getting executed, Governor's son attempts suicide-by-test-failure (while leaving a videotaped message saying he's doing this). Governor predictably attempts to intervene and manage a score swap on his son's behalf, while his son Blake rebels against this. So far, not a horrid boilerplate plot. It turns out that the swapping was basically at random (since the guy overseeing the swap only has about 2-3 minutes to carry out the swap while the scores "process") and thus a few of the highest-scoring kids in the class (Laina, the other protagonist, included) had been designated as failing. Blake and Laina break free and try to escape and/or prove what's going on. They manage to trigger a leak, prompting the Governor to override the previous list swaps (including the one saving Blake), resulting in the "correct" students getting lethal injections while the ones who actually passed were released.
Had they ended with that, perhaps with the executed students bodies being loaded into a truck for disposal or something like that, the movie would have felt like it made sense. A measure of plot-dictated incompetence aside, everyone until then had behaved in a manner I can categorize as either "rational" (the Governor trying to save Blake but folding when the situation became impossible after the leak) or "rationally irrational" (Blake's decision to intentionally fail the test). It passed Hanlon's Razor...
...and then a twist occurs! Presumably in the interest of a sequel with most of the same actors, some idiot decided that revealing to the audience that "No, they weren't really executed, they were sent to work for Foxconn...and there's Blake's not-actually-dead love interest from the first act!" was a GREAT way to end the film. Frankly, a bit of telegraphing aside, the ending is ham-fisted enough that it feels like it was slapped on at the insistence of an executive who wanted the possibility of a franchise.
That twist frankly cost this movie somewhere in the range of 1.5-2.0 stars because of the mixture of how unnecessary it was and how absurd it felt. It in no way added anything to the movie, and if anything it undermined it: Minor, often background-related, issues aside it transformed what would otherwise have been a modestly tragic ending into a farce. Without it, Blake's escapade succeeds in one respect (outing corruption in the system and saving those about to be improperly executed) but the point of his 'triumphant stand against the system' is utterly lost on the world as a whole, he's dead, and the system endures. An ending like that feels like a "well-balanced" dystopian ending with a side of biting satire, and but for the removal of that twist (and perhaps a minute of re-cutting elsewhere) we'd have that.
With all of that said, the writers do deserve a pat on the back: The movie otherwise works, but that unneeded wrinkle at the end did a number on it.
I could go on a rant about some of the overdone tropes in the movie (faceless mooks, corrupt government, incompetent security planning, lousy math, apparently-overly-elaborate procedures, etc.) but (1) those points have mostly been hit on in other reviews and (2) I can allow for a certain amount of that in a movie like this. It was easy enough to connect the dots on why a lot of what was going on was going on.
However, (SPOILER ALERT) what killed it for me (pardon the phrasing) was the end-of-film twist. Basically, the plot until the end is best summed up as this: In response to his girlfriend failing the test last year and getting executed, Governor's son attempts suicide-by-test-failure (while leaving a videotaped message saying he's doing this). Governor predictably attempts to intervene and manage a score swap on his son's behalf, while his son Blake rebels against this. So far, not a horrid boilerplate plot. It turns out that the swapping was basically at random (since the guy overseeing the swap only has about 2-3 minutes to carry out the swap while the scores "process") and thus a few of the highest-scoring kids in the class (Laina, the other protagonist, included) had been designated as failing. Blake and Laina break free and try to escape and/or prove what's going on. They manage to trigger a leak, prompting the Governor to override the previous list swaps (including the one saving Blake), resulting in the "correct" students getting lethal injections while the ones who actually passed were released.
Had they ended with that, perhaps with the executed students bodies being loaded into a truck for disposal or something like that, the movie would have felt like it made sense. A measure of plot-dictated incompetence aside, everyone until then had behaved in a manner I can categorize as either "rational" (the Governor trying to save Blake but folding when the situation became impossible after the leak) or "rationally irrational" (Blake's decision to intentionally fail the test). It passed Hanlon's Razor...
...and then a twist occurs! Presumably in the interest of a sequel with most of the same actors, some idiot decided that revealing to the audience that "No, they weren't really executed, they were sent to work for Foxconn...and there's Blake's not-actually-dead love interest from the first act!" was a GREAT way to end the film. Frankly, a bit of telegraphing aside, the ending is ham-fisted enough that it feels like it was slapped on at the insistence of an executive who wanted the possibility of a franchise.
That twist frankly cost this movie somewhere in the range of 1.5-2.0 stars because of the mixture of how unnecessary it was and how absurd it felt. It in no way added anything to the movie, and if anything it undermined it: Minor, often background-related, issues aside it transformed what would otherwise have been a modestly tragic ending into a farce. Without it, Blake's escapade succeeds in one respect (outing corruption in the system and saving those about to be improperly executed) but the point of his 'triumphant stand against the system' is utterly lost on the world as a whole, he's dead, and the system endures. An ending like that feels like a "well-balanced" dystopian ending with a side of biting satire, and but for the removal of that twist (and perhaps a minute of re-cutting elsewhere) we'd have that.
With all of that said, the writers do deserve a pat on the back: The movie otherwise works, but that unneeded wrinkle at the end did a number on it.