Ken (Kelvin Yu) is a college student on the edge – he hasn’t finished a project due to a lack of effort on the part of the other people in his group. Now with the end of the school year coming up, he must finish it in one night with a set of complete strangers. The other participants in the project are your classic high school clichés: serious minded Caleb (Mat Hostetler), snobby sorority girl Tancy, hippie Nera (Sam Doumit), sports jock Justin (Austin Nichols), and the token black athlete Aliya (Kristen Ariza). The “school” genre tends to have very one-dimensional characters these days, but John P. Aguirre’s The Utopian Society suffers in other places.
The group spends the first half of the movie messing around watching TV, getting food, and stealing beer (and getting drunk on it at a stadium) while basically getting on each other's nerves. By the second half of the film, they begin to understand each other (although some relations are strained even further at the end). I’m not into the Crash method of everyone telling the other what is right and wrong with the world – not unless it's written well. When a character launches into a monologue, that character ceases to be a part of the film and turns into a politician standing on the street corner shouting slogans at the passersby.
Some have likened this film to The Breakfast Club — it is, but without the energy and zest of the brat pack. Sure, the music has nothing to do with the '80s cheese that was in the previous film, but it's not as memorable. I'd say it was more like My Dinner With Andre than The Breakfast Club.
Since the main plot involves getting a paper done, perhaps the best technique is to focus on the paper and exploit the characters' backgrounds and personalities that way. While college is really the last hurrah of wild nights, too many of them spent that way can cost you your education. That underlying tension isn't really felt until near the end, and I felt it should have been there throughout. What the viewer is treated to in the third act is a series of confessions from all the characters – all of them except perhaps Aliya, whose only contribution to the story is laying Justin.
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