Advantageous (2015)

the audience applauded

Sorry, this movie sucks

Save your money for something good and enjoyable

The movie is made so realistic it has a lot of that WoW feeling at the right moments and never tooo over the top. the suspense is done so well and the emotion is felt. Very well put together with the music and all.

The movie feels like a 90m short film stretched out, yet still incomplete. The movie is about a woman, Gwen, who is "too old" for her job as a spokesperson for a biomedical company and many women in general are being pushed out of the workforce. Her company has a solution but she has to decide how far she will go, not only for herself but her young, but bright and talented, daughter. There is a current of a greater world behind the scenes that are hinted at yet we only see things from Gwen's perspective, so therefore the world we see is very narrow. There are things going on in the background of this near-future New York where there is civil unrest and hints of other people going to extremes hoping to make a change, or trying to adapt or react to this 'new world'. However, even though these are there, they play literally no part in this world so they may have well been cut. The core story feels like it would have made for an excellent short film, but as a full film it feels very lacking. There is little going on but what you see at face value, and there are many long silences that add little. The end has a 'twist' but I had already suspected it long before it came. Almost all of the choices made during the film are very counter intuitive. Gwen, the main character, makes a choice so drastic that it completely changes how the world sees her, to such a degree I was wondering what the she/the director they were thinking! Especially as she had "choices". Her bosses at her company also make certain decisions that seem to sabotage what their end-goal was. Even her family and friends act in strange, unrealistic ways. Speaking of her family, there is a quick backstory that is touched upon between herself and her parents, but it too was completely unnecessary and pointless as we are never given any information regarding it. While I realize the film was trying to show her isolation and inability to turn to anyone else for help, it still falls flat.In the end, the movie feels like it could have dropped these dangling thread sub-plots and had a much stronger short-film than this drawn out affair. I love good sci-fi, ranging from cerebral to action-packed but this was a melodrama with sci-fi themes used in order to attempt to tackle the idea of identity, sacrifice, and choice. If you want a female-centric melodrama with sci-fi undertones questioning the identity of 'self' and how far a mother would go for her childs future, this might be right up your alley. It has a good mother-daughter relationship at the center of the story with decent acting, though a bit morose and and joyless. The moments of mother-daughter time were honestly the better part of this film, but they dont really go well in the sci-fi dystopia they were trying to build.

I have to be honest, "Advantageous" is intriguing but frustrating for the first hour. Part mystery and part Dystopian-sleeper-drama, the story moves at a snail pace but like yarn to a scarf the information in the first carefully woven scenes is vital. Set in a near-distant future with a nearly non-existent middle-class and where education and talent are no longer commodities, Gwen relies on her beauty and youth to barely hold on to her middle-class standing. As she faces the ever-constant ravages of time, with a child to support, and a past she's too ashamed to confront Gwen makes a desperate decision to try an experimental procedure in order to guarantee that her daughter Jules secures a spot in the elite class.I cannot emphasize enough the emotional roller-coaster that the film evokes in its last thirty minutes. The nature-nurture argument alone will keep your mind reeling as the closing credits roll but as a former foster caregiver and parent, I cannot discount the deep ache that I still feel over the interaction between Gwen and Jules in the last few scenes.Described as "animal connection" in the film, the fact that consciousness is inching closer to a scientific definition is challenged by writers Phang and Kim who decry that consciousness without soul is incomplete.As a mathematical physicist, however, I find the ending hopeful in that "time" seems to be the missing ingredient. Reminiscent of Maxwell's equation's, I find that just as the time-harmonic equations show a simple and basic universe of electricity and magnetism, the consciousness-soul equation may indeed have its own trivial time-harmonic consequences.I hope you will agree with me, though, that the movie has an optimistic end since the final interactions between Gwen and Jules reignite a soul-like spark that is different but connected nonetheless to the original. It is this type of soul that many adoptive parents and children share and it is this time-dependent ingredient that may signify the potential for a complete scientific definition of consciousness.I recommend "Advantageous" highly and give it a rating of 9 out 10. It is worth it to suffer through the slow-paced start to reach a thoughtful, surprising, and satisfying finish. I do warn you, however, that you need to enjoy or at least be intrigued by science at some level to be as enthusiastic about the film as I am.

The plot: In a dystopian future, an Asian woman approaching middle age is fired from her job at a creepy multinational corporation because they want a younger, more racially ambiguous spokesperson. How far will she go to regain her job?The premise is definitely interesting, and there were parts of the film that I really liked. However, the story continually came back to tedious metaphysical themes that bored me. In the end, I realized that the film was about the metaphysical themes, and this left me feeling a bit unfulfilled. I suppose it was even more so about cultural criticism, especially a feminist critique of how society treats female aging and beauty. But it kept coming back again and again to these questions of "why am I here", "what is my purpose", and "is there something insubstantial, such as love, that science can't replicate in a lab"?Kim plays a woman who must make a life-changing choice. Unemployment is skyrocketing, men are pressuring women to leave the workforce, and older workers are seen as hopelessly out-of-touch with the modern market. In fact, humans themselves are being rapidly replaced, and the only way to secure any kind of hope for your child's future is for them to attend the most prestigious schools. The alternative seems to be child prostitution. Most of this is established in the background; if you don't pay close attention, you'll miss it. Unexplained explosions rock the sterility and eerie quiet of the world, and news reports hint at terrorist uprisings because of a hopeless, jobless populace.So, when you lose your job, that basically means that you've lost everything. What if your employer offers to give you your job back if you'll let them control who you are? So, our protagonist becomes desperate to avoid forcing her own daughter to make these same kinds of desperate choices. What can she do but accept? The question becomes what price she has paid. As the film mulls this over, I began to lose interest. Normally, it takes very little for me to become heavily involved in a character's plight, but, in this case, I struggled. Maybe it's because I don't have kids. For a parent, maybe this would be a more harrowing tale.There are many admirable aspects to this film, chief among them a woman-centric tale that feels genuine. In some science fiction films, the female protagonist seems to have been written as a male who then gets a gender-flip to mix things up. Or she's a sexual object for the viewers to ogle. There's nothing wrong with a bit of exploitative science fiction, but it's nice to see something with higher aspirations every once in a while. This certainly has that, but it goes so far as to seem pretentious at times.Maybe this was simply too far outside of my demographic. On the surface, it's got a lot of themes and ideas that appeal to me, but the focus seems to be diametrically opposed to how I would have done it. Less metaphysics, more world-building. If you're interested in feminist science fiction, however, this is rare example. You should at least give it a chance if you're interested in such things. Perhaps you'll be more intrigued by the themes than I was.

hmmm, lots of people loved this film...and undoubtedly it is beautifully crafted and the acting is exceptional. The whole atmosphere draws you in with both poetry and passion, stylistically it is subtle but powerful. Yet the heart of the movie is the philosophical and spiritual meaning of the mother and daughter relationship between Gwen and Jules, and here there is a paradox which is the climax of the plot, and which the entire film depends on to work. This paradox, however is glossed over. The film would've worked better had it been confronted more clearly. As it was, it strained the credibility of the message of the film. Gwen decides she must put her daughter's needs before all else. That's understandable, she loves her daughter, they have a deep connection, and only have each other in a sterile and insecure world where the status of women depends on their marketability and connections. Nothing groundbreaking there. To help her daughter, Gwen must take action when she loses her job.As you watch it, ask yourself: does Gwen's decision really match her deepest values as a mother? Was there really no better alternative?Here's the spoiler: Gwen decides to sacrifice the one thing that her daughter needs more than anything...her own mother... So that Jules can go to an elite school. Where the other mothers are horrid, vapid things, whom Gwen clearly dislikes. Can that really be the best thing for Jules? Gwen seems despairing of the way the world is. Yet she sacrifices the most precious things in both their lives so that Jules can become the same commodity that Gwen became. WTF???Several times the question is raised: why am I here? Why am I alive? But this question is glossed over. Gwen's best answer seems to be that she didn't know what the point of her life was until she had Jules, then Jules became the point of her life. So then she sets things up so that Jules can live the same kind of pointless life? WTF???Gwen attempts to hide the truth from her daughter. This was the weakest point in the whole script. Presumably it was supposed to highlight Gwen's understanding that the most important thing to Jules was her relationship with her mother, the most real and secure thing she had in the world. And not let her feel guilty about her mother's sacrifice. Yet Gwen's decision destroyed this relationship. And clearly a smart, sensitive kid like Jules is going to work out pretty quickly that something is seriously wrong.The last scenes ironically show the alternative decision that Gwen could've made. A simpler life with family rather than status giving security and meaning to life. The film asks us to believe that this option wasn't possible because the chance came too late. Well, that only works if you buy the premise that Gwen couldn't imagine that Jules could've have been happier with a working class life, even home schooled, but with her real mother.For me this film would have had a far stronger feminist message had Gwen rejected the roles that society imposed on herself and her daughter, even if it meant being poor and old.Major spoiler:Finally Gwen also knowingly participated in a con that not only actively encouraged many other people, especially women, to be insecure about their aging, but amounted to being an accessory to their murder. Yet the film barely touches on this, except to emphasize the sacrifice Gwen made for her daughter. Hmmm.This film seduces the viewer but left a nasty taste in my mouth at the end.