I’m not saying Zone 414 is a bad movie, I’m saying it’s a bad cyberpunk movie.
Here’s the premise: rich old guy hires a retired detective to enter a zone inhabited by androids to retrieve his lost daughter. Sounds like the perfect setup for a cyberpunk movie. And yet, if you watched this movie with the sound off, I’m not sure you could even tell it’s supposed to be scifi. For most of the characters, we only know they’re androids because someone said they were.
I think there are a total of 2 scenes early in the movie which show these characters are indeed androids. Yet for the rest of the movie, there is no hint of anything scifi/futuristic in the sets or the characters. I’m guessing the budget they could’ve spent on VFX was spent on hiring Guy Pearce instead. The image attached to this post never happens in the movie. There are no building-sized advertisements; those are just images of the female lead superimposed on buildings for marketing purposes.
Now, I’m not someone who needs neon lights and cybernetic limbs to call something cyberpunk, but this movie is really just “rich old guy hires a retired detective to enter the red-light district of a city to retrieve his lost daughter.” When I say there’s no hint of anything scifi/futuristic, I mean the characters use rotary phones, listen to record players, and drive in standard yellow taxis.
Can something set in the present day (or even in the past, given the rotary phones) be considered cyberpunk? I don’t mean retro-futurism, I mean nothing scifi at all. Are there cyberpunk themes in this movie? Somewhat. A rich person hires a detective to avoid staining his giant corporation’s image. Are the themes strong enough to stand on their own without the accompanying visuals? That’s where I say no.
To reiterate, I’m not saying this is a bad movie. If you want to watch a movie about a retired cop tracking down a lost rich girl, I don’t think it’s a poor execution. But the android aspect of this movie is really down-played in my opinion and that’s all there was to make this a scifi.
Have any of you watched this movie? Do you disagree?
Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7GYp9VLcow
The movie is streaming on Netflix
I wonder if it was filmed as one thing, and then retro-fitted as sci-fi, with the scenes you mentioned coming from re-shoots. It’d be interesting if all other references to people being androids, etc could have conceivably been added with ADR.
While I do think it’d be funny to retrofit a movie to suddenly be scifi/cyberpunk, I think this is just another case of the budget being too small to do anything effectively.
Although now you’ve got me thinking about how much of the plot in this movie would need to change if you removed all mention of androids…
If I remember correctly, the fact that some people are androids is pretty integral to the motivations of certain characters. But, I could be thinking of an entirely different film.
