REPO MEN is a futuristic fantasy film whose reality may not be so far off.
Jude Law and Forrest Whittaker star as “repo men.” They work for a company headed by a slimy salesman played by Liev Schreiber. Having seen Liev Schreiber play Wolverine’s mean-streaked brother Sabertooth in X-Men Origins makes it easy to imagine him as a heartless company man who sells (and then reclaims) life-saving organs via impossibly high-interest loans.
We spent the latter half of the film watching him engage in improbable knife fights with company deputies. We saw him scale security, and successfully stop the computer that scans the bar codes of the leased-out organs. We see him lounging leisurely on a beach, seated beside a female cohort (whom he rescued after he was abandoned by his own wife, who was repulsed by his “repo” work). The two drink colorful cocktails, watch the waves wash up on the sand, as the sun shines, and as Forest Whittaker sits beside them, toasting their great escape from the clutches of the “company.”
And then, in the end, we learn that this scene is but a dream or delusion. It is a false memory that has been implanted through electrodes attached to Law’s head. His brain stopped functioning the moment it hit the metal grating.
For a generation that faces a looming epidemic of Alzheimer’s, a form of dementia that has little response to the few pharmaceuticals on the market, this film makes an important point. Is this what awaits us? Are these implanted memories preferable to dying of dementia? A good question.
Pl turn to http://www.neurospotlight.com for more discussion of this subject.
