B Plus Movies

Cyberpunk is a genre of fiction, mostly revolving around the idea of society reacting to technologies coming at us so fast that we’re unable to comprehend their impact fully before we have to become proficient in their use. Generally, cyberpunk drew upon dystopian visions of the future along with the symbolism of replacing body parts, either with bionic or artificial organic parts, representing man’s descent into inhumanity when confronted with the pressures of living in the modern world. Cyberpunk was also declared dead by one it’s finest authors, Neal Stephenson.

I have to wonder what he thinks of Repo: The Genetic Opera.

The world of Repo: The Genetic Opera is one in which organ failure is a common and ubiquitous problem, the same as bad vision or wisdom teeth might be today. Necessity being the mother of invention, a company is born which produces designer organs which first are a medical miracle but soon become a fashion statement. The problem is that organs are expensive and most have to buy them on credit. If you default on too many payments, they do more than wreck your credit rating: they send the Repo Man to come collect their property.

Enter Shilo (played by Alexa Vega of the Spy Kids trilogy), a young girl who has grown up to the age of 17 constantly hampered by a blood disease, inherited from her mother. She is guarded by her father day and night (played by Anthony Stewart Head of Buffy: The Vampire Slayer). As a parent and doctor, he provides as safe world as he can for Shilo, but cannot tell her that he has another occupation. He is a Repo Man, the one the company calls directly when important organs must be taken from important people.

Adding to this melodramatic tragedy in the making is the family who runs the organ making company, GeneCo. They are composed of the cruel family head, the rage filled eldest son, the face-stealing younger son and the scandalous, wannabe singer daughter (played by Paris Hilton… what a stretch). There’s also a grave robber who gets drugs out of the brains of corpses, an opera singer (played by Sarah Brightman) who has effectively sold herself to GeneCo and a whole parade of scarred, gun toting figures to fill out this violently surreal setting.

Did I mention it’s a musical?

With its Wagnerian scope, Shakespearean themes and George Romero-esque imagery,  Repo: The Genetic Opera was either going to be awful or awesome. I prepared myself for awful. Which may be why I got awesome.

From the first moments actors start taking the screen, I couldn’t look away. Sometimes, it was because I couldn’t believe what they were showing me. Sometimes it was because I couldn’t wait to see what was next. But scene after scene, the movie kept throwing visuals at me that stunned and amazed backed by music that flowed with the story and didn’t, as it does in so many musicals, seem tacked on.

The highlights for me were Blind Meg/Sarah Brightman, who played her role flawlessly as well as the Grave Robber, who serves as the story’s narrator in addition to being a playful yet morbid in-story purveyor of recycled drugs.

This is a movie bound to produce strong reactions, the sort of film that must have the right sort of gallows humor to enjoy or at least have a strong stomach to experience. There were some choices that the director made that might lose those not attracted by the imagery: the pace of the movie is a little off in the first third of the film, for instance. Part of the story is also told with flashbacks and drawings where one might expect a movie with “opera” in the title to tell these plot points in song. The movie is not flawless, sorry to say.

But I wasn’t hoping for flawless. I was hoping for B+.

Repo: The Genetic Opera may not revive cyberpunk as a genre, but it certainly does suggest that it lives on in the sick imaginations of at least two screenwriters. If the movie gains the cult status that it truly deserves, those imaginations have suggested the possibility of a prequel and a sequel. I hope this movie gets the attention required for those projects and that, like this one, they hit that perfect balance of bizarre and watchable that so many would-be cult films fail to achieve.

To make a long commentary one question and answer longer, is Repo: The Genetic Opera B+? You bet your mortgaged liver it is.

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