Sleep Dealer, Blu-ray (2009)
Starring Luis Fernando Pena, Leonor Varela, Jacob Vargas
Studio: Maya Entertainment MA 1098 [Release date: Sept. 9, 09]
Video: 16:9 color 1080p HD
Audio: Spanish or English DD 5.1
Subtitles: English
Extras: “Before the Making Of” documentary; Audio commentary by director Alex Rivera
Length: 90 minutes
Rating: *****
Viewing this just after seeing District 9 in the theaters points up that there may be a possible new direction in sci-fi movies. Both take a really original story, plus some very good (but not mind-blowing) special effects, and use them to craft a fine adult science fiction tale with a strong social justice theme.
It is the near future and Memo is a young man in a backward community in Oaxaca, Mexico, where a giant gringo corporation has built a huge dam, cutting off the water for crops supplied by the river. It brutally protects its property with remote control surveillance and machine guns, charging the Mexicans high prices for precious water. Memo seeks a way out of the dusty village by building some sort of electronic terminal out of salvaged parts which ties into the cyberpunk world outside. The dam has been threatened by terrorists, and somehow his antenna is spotted and thus his home is made a target by the corporation and destroyed with a missile, killing his father.
Memo’s only option is to leave for Tijuana, “the city of the future,” where the giant Cybracero company has hundreds of workers with implanted nodes on their bodies, who do work via remote control of robots in the U.S. A wall now totally prevents any immigration to the U.S., so the Mexicans work in the U.S. remotely while staying in Tijuana. A young woman befriends Memo when he is mugged for the little money he brought to have the nodes implanted on himself. She is a “coyoteka” and does the implants herself for free, but she is also selling online a report of her story about Memo and calls herself a "writer." The buyer of the story is the remote pilot of the drone aircraft which blew up Memo’s home, who also happens to be of Mexican descent – whose family emigrated earlier.
A relationship builds between Memo and the girl, and eventually the remote pilot comes to Mexico to talk to Memo after learning the terrible details of what his superiors ordered him to do. The conclusion is satisfying, though it still leaves the viewer with remorse over the depressing lack of options for poverty-level Mexicans. The story is grounded in today’s situations, with a bit of a stretch to the sci-fi aspect of a possible future. The special effects are just enough to carry the story, and the acting is believable. There are some odd color casts and some of the scenes are extremely dark, but in general they fit perfectly the various moods the film wants to convey. I think the slight deficiencies in the visuals would be more annoying in a standard DVD transfer than they are on the Blu-ray. I watched the subtitled version, but there is also a choice of a soundtrack dubbed in English. I was unable to navigate to the documentary on the making of the film, so cannot report on that. (I’ve run into some navigation problems with a couple Blu-rays recently.)
– John Sunier
