This came up on my Prime feed for watching after a hard day of work.
At first, the concept was intriguing and compelling. Solve some of the worlds problems with overpopulation and resource straining by allowing people to be "downsized" to approximately 5 inches, or roughly the same size as an action hero doll. There is even a "Truman" style all-encompassing village for them all to live in luxury in downsized mansions that would fit onto a real life dining table.
The leads, Matt Damon and Kristen Wiig, are always bankable for bringing interesting characters to life, and the whole downsizing process for Matt Damon is breathtaking. That all happens in roughly the first half of the movie, but things go downhill fast after Christoph Waltz enters the picture as Matt Damon's obnoxious upstairs neighbor.
First off, earlier scenes show the Matt Damon character, "Paul" taking up residence in one of the Lilliputian mansions with his own yard around it. However, he later appears to live in some type of highrise with elevators without any explanation of why he moved (or maybe I missed it).
By the time the Paul character helps an Asian refugee and ends up visiting the "slum" of the small people neighborhoods to help a disadvantaged small person, I found myself clicking on the screen to see how much of the movie was left. Forty-five minutes? Ugh.
So chalk it up to bad execution or bad scriptwriting, but to me there's little wonder why the movie failed massively at the box office, reaping only a fraction of its production costs, bloated because of the breathtaking special effects from the first half. Eventually, I may see the final 45 minutes since Prime allows you to pick up where you left off, but I certainly won't go out of my way to do it!
