Visioneers (Jared Drake, 2008): USA

Reviewed by Hannah Ghioni. Viewed at the AFI Film Festival, ArcLight Hollywood

Visioneers is an odd film. That is the only word I can think of to describe it. I found myself laughing at a lot of parts, but then thinking in my head that what I was laughing about was really kind of depressing and not funny at all. I have a lot of mixed feelings about this movie though, becuase first I thought it was just a funny comedy, and then as the film progressed, I tried to put deeper meanings into much of what was happening becuase I thought that that was what the directores were intending. But then at the Q and A after the film, I found that the directors didn’t even have motives for a lot for a lot of what people were looking for the deeper meaning for. Then I thought that the movie was actually funny since I had heard what they had to say.

The movie is about a boring work place where everyone is so bored and sick of working there, that they begin to explode. The boss of the company is trying to create ways to keep the employees and the people of the town from blowing up, but it keeps happening. The person that the main character has somewhat of a secret crush on is a lady that works on the floor one level higher than his. They exchange a few words a day on the telephone between offices, but that is the full extent of their relationship. In kind of a sweet way, when everything begins to go wrong and everyone is exploding, he turns to love as his one and only answer to make sence in his life. He ventures to the place where she works, a company owened by her father, and meets her for the first time. She is beautiful and kind and in a way nothing really matters to him anymore. As the film continues however, he faces another problem in addition to the fact that everything else it going wrong. When he goes to see this secret crush of his, he is saddened to find that she now has a computer chip placed on her neck to keep her happy. He is so disapointed that she no longer knows reality, but becomes happy when the story takes a shift.

I really enjoyed the adventure of this film. Though the setting and the props were semi-bland, the adventure was in the mind.