The special effects aren’t exactly top-notch by today’s standards but let’s not forget this isn’t Spider-Man 3 or Transformers where they had upwards of 150 million dollars to spend. For the small amount of money they no doubt had, the effects are decent and sometimes impressive enough to work. It just goes to prove you don’t need a huge budget to make a movie look good, especially a sci-fi movie.
The reason to see the movie above all else is how original and creative it all is. Now certainly there are influences that are very clear here, The Matrix being a very evident one, but it doesn’t come off as it ripping anything off but rather it takes those ideas, morphs them into new ones, and employs them in such a way that it feels creative and fresh. Having said that, there are many elements here which I, for one, have never heard of in any other movie, such as being able to save and sell your own memories, which helps give it that unique backbone.
One of the weaker elements of the film, and this is what ultimately holds it back a lot, is how confusing a lot of it is. Now I can tell when it’s just that I personally can’t keep up or whether most people wouldn’t be able to and I think this is a case of the latter. There are a few of those aforementioned ambitious ideas that are clearly fighting for their place within the film and as a consequence some of the time it feels all a bit jumbled up. However it’s very rare that a sci-fi film gets the ideas to blend perfectly and Sleep Dealer unfortunately doesn’t fall into that category.
Although certainly not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, Sleep Dealer is an ambitious and unique film with a fascinating technological element and an admirable humanistic aspect to go along with it. It’s science fiction in a light I doubt you will have seen before.
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