I am not entirely sure what I was expecting as I rented this film from Redbox. I love Matt Damon and the supporting cast who I knew were in this movie, but I was not certain what would come out of the actual story. Unfortunately, Downsizing turned out to be a jumbled, tone-deaf mess. Damon and his co-star Hong Chau were among some of the only positives of the film, but even then it was not nearly enough to make it worth the $1.50 rental.
This film is riddled with problems from the beginning. Throughout the whole movie, the pacing is very slow and uneven, which made it so difficult to watch. The movie is way too long, topping out at two hours and fifteen minutes and it dragged the story on forever. One of the introductory scenes where Damon's character Paul is actually undergoing the downsizing procedure took almost ten minutes to show and I nearly fell asleep. One might think that an Oscar-winning director could handle an awkward pacing issue, but apparently not. As for the story, the plot lines were so blurry and not able to blend together effectively. The first and second acts went well together, showing what Paul's new life was like at 5 inches tall and without his wife by his side. The third act, however, is where everything took a turn for the worse. It drastically altered in tone from a lighthearted sci-fi drama to an apocalyptic survival drama. The central theme of the film is saving the planet's ecosystem by shrinking yourself to produce less waste. This made sense for the film, but the introduction of methane gas coming from Antarctica and bringing upon the apocalypse was so sudden and not developed at all. Damon's Paul and Chau's Ngoc sailed to a new society where they had been preparing to escape this said apocalypse, but all of these new plot details came with no foreshadowing or development in the slightest. This entire third act did not remotely fit in with the story set before it and it was wildly far-fetched, even for a movie that's about shrinking people down (practically ripping off Honey, I Shrunk the Kids).
Characters in this film did not have any resolution at all, besides a half-attempted romance between Paul and Ngoc. These characters did not have any time to develop, probably because the writers were too focused on making the message of the film as incoherent as possible. Many concepts like global warming, over-population, and self-identity came up in the film, but none of them were fully explored. I feel that Alexander Payne, the director, had a message about Earth that he wanted to convey but was not sure how to do it. If the movie would have focused on one message, it would have been much clearer. The writing could have built up to the apocalypse or it could have focused on Paul's life changing as a miniature person. Either of these would have boded better for the story. The last small issue that I had was Hong Chau's character Ngoc. Even though she provided a lot of decent humor for the second and third act, her accent and mannerisms were very unnecessarily exaggerated. She had been living in the United States for a while after escaping as a refugee, but there is no reason why she had to have such a stereotypical, broken-English accent. One thing that I did like about the character of Ngoc was that the actress was actually Vietnamese. No whitewashing, which was pleasant, but there were still issues.
Matt Damon and Ngoc Chau were some of the only positives in this film as they did bring some nice light to their characters, no matter how broken the story was. I also enjoyed the small cameos by Jason Sudeikis, Neil Patrick Harris, Kristen Wiig, Laura Dern, and Christoph Waltz. I just wish their miniature (pun intended) roles would have been larger. The design and sets in this film were great to see too, as actual miniature neighborhoods and buildings were built for the establishing shots. This small aesthetic worked well for the movie.
Downsizing is not a great film by my standards, as the story was off-putting and the message unclear. It truly felt like an SNL skit that was turned into a full-length feature. But instead of going the comedy route, it desperately reached for any kind of dramatic premise. I would not recommend this extinction-of-the-human-race film unless you really, REALLY want to see Matt Damon in a fat suit.
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