Culture

Rating: 1.5/5

I wish I could provide an understandable synopsis of Paranoia, but I still have no idea what it is about.

I think it is about Adam Cassidy (Liam Hemsworth), an intern at a large corporation that sells and distributes SmartPhones. Cassidy somehow gets his whole team fired by doing … nothing much. This is the first step in what proves to be a terrible narrative.

He then takes the team out on the piss on the company credit card. Turns out this is a big no no – what a surprise. As a form of punishment, his ruthless CEO Nicholas Wyatt (Gary Oldman) forces him to spy on corporate rival Jock Goddard (Harrison Ford), who was once Wyatt’s mentor. Along the way Cassidy falls in love, but has to betray his new girlfriend in order to save his father, becoming just another pawn in the corporate battle. As if this wasn’t ridiculous enough, he manages to do all of this whilst remaining constantly topless.

If I didn’t have to write this review, I would have walked out of the cinema. Hollywood today seems to be a massive machine that eats money at one end and squeezes out abysmal films at the other. The film plays with the new, media-saturated surveillance society that surrounds us – a great premise, if it was not so terribly explored. Basically, I sat through two hours of rubbish advertising the boundless new uses of SmartPhones.

The cheesy voiceovers by Hemsworth about our greed-ridden humanity lacked merit, as he is clearly only acting in this abomination for money. In trying to show us how consumer culture corrupts, Paranoia instead condones it every step of the way. What with the constant close ups of MacBook Pros and the Ray-Bans wrapped around the actors’ beautiful faces, I quickly got tired of being sold things.

After painfully enduring this fluffy, plotless junk, I think the advertisers at Apple made a grave mistake in having their products associated with the film. The mysterious “plot-twist” made no sense, and I actually laughed a few times at some of the shoddy writing. The real conspiracy here is, surely, who is continuing to pay to produce these films?