Week 3, Part 2 - Repo! The Genetic Opera

I know this film has nothing at all to do with the short films we watched in class, but I watched it last night so I thought it would be a good one to analyse this week.

This week was all about going from A to B, and Repo! isn't a film like that (in the same sense as the first two BMW films we watched anyway). It's about a sick girl named Shiloh and her journey to be cured from an illness she's had all her life. It's a dark future where there have been hundreds of thousands of organ failures. GeneCo, an organ transplant company, loans out organs to people in need however if a recipient misses a payment a RepoMan will come and collect the loaned organ.

As it is an opera and was originally a stage production the characters are quite melodramatic and don't have the same realism you might see in some other films. That doesn't mean the film makers didn't know their characters extremely well however, and they are consistent and most of them do not grow or change at all. As it is a stage production the characters are quite simple so keeping up some level of consistently isn't that difficult. Luigi, eldest son to GeneCo's founder, is violent. That's it. Amber Sweet, daughter of GeneCo's founder, is addicted to plastic surgery. That's it. Many of the other characters are just as simple, especially the antagonists.

It has a solid structure and is consistent. To describe the past of various characters a comic book montage is shown on screen. This comic book style is used at various points throughout the movie so it doesn't feel odd when it happens again, actually it would be strange if it only happened once (like the scene where Hugo Stiglitz is introduced in Inglourious Basterds).

The film makers did write what they know in a way. They obviously don't know the future, and I don't think they know much about organ transplants and organ repossessions, however they do know opera and they do know horror. Darren Lynn Bousman directed the film, having also directed Saw 2, 3 and 4.

That's all I can think about for this movie, the end.