I really enjoy sci-fi but I realize that it is likely one of the most difficult genres to do properly because of the visuals required in creating something that is both scientific and also not real - yet.
The description of What Happened to Monday was enough to draw me in because it deals with a topic matter that I believe is actually pretty real to life with overpopulation of the planet being the main focus here.
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Alright, so it goes like this: It is an undisclosed period of time in the future and strange things have happened to the human race where it becomes very common for mothers to have twins, triplets, quadruplets, and whatever the things are called that go beyond that. Basically having one child at a time has become rare because of genetic reasons or something. It doesn't really matter it just needs to be accepted in order to move forward.
It is dictated globally that parents are allowed only 1 child and if they have any more than that the other children have to be taken to be put into cryo-stasis or frozen until such a time arrives in the future where the global food-shortage problem has been solved.
A father turned grandfather who lost his daughter decides to raise his daughter's daughters in isolation and in secret so that the government doesn't come and take 6 of them away.
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He somehow gets them home to his house and this is where one of the most unrealistic portions of the film, sci-fi or not, kicks in. He lives in an urban area with tons of windows and also shared walls with neighbors in an apartment complex yet somehow he is able to keep the fact that there are 6 damn kids in that apartment a complete secret from everyone for a very long time.
The girls know nothing of the outside world other than what they are told by their grandfather until they are of school-attending age, then grandfather (played wonderfully, as expected, by Willem Dafoe) enrolls them in school and all 7 of the girls have to live the same life but only allowed one day of the week outside of the house. When the girls return home they have to spend a lot of time getting the other girls up to speed on what their shared life is like since they are meant to all be one person.
It's not the best plot because all of this would be considerably easier if they were just to move out to the countryside somewhere but I guess that isn't possible because of the overcrowding aspect of the globe at the time. Whatever! Accept it and move on.
Things are kept really interesting as we jump back and forth in time but the show isn't without its continuity flaws as well as some pretty egregious plot-holes that they do not bother to explain.
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They are named after the days of the week because that's easier to remember or something and they all have slightly different characteristics. This makes a lot less sense once they are adults because if they are still sharing days of the week that they are allowed to leave the house, they no longer look the same. In fact, for the sake (I'm guessing) for the audience to try to wrap their heads around who it is that we are looking at during any particular scene, they are very noticeably different looking.
Despite this obvious plot-hole, I was still able to roll with the story but one aspect of this reasonably good plot really gets under my skin and that was the decision to cast Noomi Rapace as the role of all 7 of the kids-turned-adult.
Noomi is a good actress, there is no denying that and whether you realize it or not you probably recognize her from the "Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" films - the Swedish ones, not the completely unnecessary Daniel Craig movies that were made in English.
The problem with Noomi is that she speaks English with a pretty thick accent which is fine because she is Swedish. All 7 of her characters have accents to some degree and this makes absolutely no sense considering that the only person that the girls have had any consistent contact with at any point in their lives has been one another and their grandfather Terrance, who sounds like the quintessential neutral-voiced American that he is. So how the hell did they all end up sounding like a Swedish person speaking English?
No matter how you want to look at the world now or in a science-fiction sense, we all end up sounding like the environment that we grow up in... but not the sisters Sunday through Saturday apparently.
I can deal with the fact that they live in an apartment with tons of windows where the shades apparently are never drawn and I can even get on board with neighbors not being affected by the sounds of footsteps above that probably sounded like a house party a great deal of the time yet nobody reported anything whn the present they live in is very much a nanny state of "big brother is watching you." I can accept the fact that they never had access to medical care because they can't go outside of the house for the most part yet none of them ever got sick. I can accept the fact that the girls sneak out of the window safely and wander around when the plot calls for it. I can accept the fact that we spend a large amount of time focusing on their special hiding place in grand detail but the one and only time its used it is discovered almost immediately.
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I cannot, however, accept the fact that 7 children raised from birth to adulthood by a man with an American accent all end up sounding like Scandinavians. It wouldn't even be possible to make this happen on purpose as a very long-term joke. It's too much of a stretch, even for a science-fiction film.
I just wonder why did they do this? Noomi was already well past her famous prime by 2017 and she never was really a household name. Maybe she was willing to do it for very little money? She does do an awful lot of acting in this film and it must have taken a very long time and a ton of patience to do the roles of 7 different people who often appear in scenes all at once.
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I think the producers were aware of the fact that this film was going to face a tremendous amount of criticism and thus the decision was made to not release it in North American theaters. It didn't have a theatrical run in any native-English speaking country and as far as I can tell it was only released in Europe via France where anything other than a French overdub would probably result in riots.
The rest of the cinema audience was the Asian market which I think we all know is the major target of filmmakers these days anyway. For the rest of the world it was released only on Netflix which is the modern-day equivalent of "straight to DVD ."
Should I watch it?
Honestly, no, I don't think you should watch it. They try to throw twists in there but if you are even paying halfway attention to the movie you can see them coming from a long ways away and when are revealed your response will be "well, of course."
I knew two major plot "twists" as soon as just one side of it was presented and these were meant to be a misdirection - just not very skillfully presented. I am not very smart either.
Willem Dafoe and Glenn Close are both in this movie, but only just. I feel as though both of them were cast just to pad the cast and Close's performance in particular feels dialed in. I'm not fully convinced that she was actually in the same room as her co-stars during the scenes that she is in because almost all of them are close-ups or shot from behind her. Dafoe's scenes could have been filmed in a single afternoon session as he too appears to not actually be in the same room as the other people he is interacting with in many scenes.
This is very skippable and I would advise that you do so. I can't really even recommend this to die-hard sci-fi fans because there is limited time in a day, and so much other, better stuff to watch. Variety Magazine called the movie "a ludicrous, violent, amusingly dumb sci-fi actioner" and I think that is actually quite the perfect way of describing it.
As should be obvious from the write-up, this can be legally streamed on Netflix in most regions