The Geekscape Review – Repo! The Genetic Opera
As I was driving to the screening of this movie I was singing Leona Lewis’ Bleeding Love at the top of my lungs. I love Hedwig and the Angry Inch and did, very much, roll with the goth crowd in high school. Although, I’m not sure if I used the word “roll” at that point in time. Needless to say, my threshold for cheesy and goth are both very high. I can withstand unbelievable amounts of each, so I went into Repo! The Genetic Opera with a very optimistic air of just wanting to hear some good songs, and to enjoy some power-chords over some auto-tune while hot chicks laden in leather and covered in blood dance around the screen. I barely got the latter, I got the auto-tune quite a bit, but my god did I forget the old adage of “be careful what you wish for” with the power chords. Worst of all, I didn’t get a single good song. Repo! The Genetic Opera was a disappointment in that it could have been something huge had the writer/director and musicians behind the songs not bitten off a lot more than they could chew musically and creatively.
I know more than a few people that have been looking forward to this project for a very long time. I mean hell, it’s about a not-so-distant future in which an epidemic of organ failure has plagued humanity and wiped out a lot of it when a heroic company called GeneCo provides people with hope – organs that can be leased. They save lives, but at what cost? Remember when your student loans went to collections? Well what if they came around and ripped up your diploma? That’s generous compared to what goes on in this story – people who cannot pay off their organs are killed and stripped of their organs by the Repo Man. He is a doctor with a license to kill. Awesome premise, right? Sure, but the only problem here is trying to get some story behind this…someone must have forgotten it somewhere, though, because this film has less story than a nutrition facts label. That might have been a little harsh, but hear me out.
The conflict and emotional impact we are supposed to get out of this movie stems from the delicate father-daughter relationship between the Repo Man (played as well as it could have been by Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Anthony Stewart Head – that’s right – Giles!) himself and his daughter Shiloh (played surprisingly well by Alexa Vega of Spy Kids and Sleepover). The Repo Man is dealing with his plagued existence since he tried to cure his wife of a vague sickness she experienced during pregnancy and ended up killing her. He had a choice to save one of them and he chose his beloved daughter Shiloh. He raised her alone and chooses to sing about it so much that it is almost insulting. There was a point I actually wanted to say “Ok. We get it. You’ve told us three different times in three different ways. Let’s move on”.
Shiloh is currently a seventeen year old rebel that is confined to a bed due to the disease she supposedly inherited from her dead mother. She sings about this at length as well. She constantly disobeys her father, but has a good heart, as she is our primary protagonist in the film.
The antagonism comes from the rich family that owns GeneCo, the Largos, played by Paul Sorvino, Bill Moseley, Nivek Ogre, and Paris Hilton. They are evil, and as their father Rotti begins to die, the children vie for the inheritance of the largest corporation on the planet, while the dying man plots his final revenge against the man who not only works for him, but also took the one and only love of his life seventeen years ago – the Repo Man.
Through all of this half-story, nothing gets resolved. No believable relationships are formed between any of the characters, and absolutely no emotional tension is built during any scenes including any of the actors. You know you’re supposed to be rooting for someone the entire time, but don’t feel anything for any of the characters. I could not have cared less what happened to the characters throughout the entire movie. Any deaths, no matter how important, are not felt by the audience at anything but a superficial level.
It’s obvious that the writers are to blame, and the director made this feel as much like a stage play as a film possibly can, but my primary blame for how bored i was throughout the movie will go to the music – or lack thereof.
All the numbers seemed almost jammy in how uneventful and non-chalant they were. The songs were just there, and they did not help to emotionally develop any kind of conflict, tension, relief, longing, or excitement. The vocal melodies done to the very lackluster orchestration of rock songs that had less energy than volume took absolutely zero chances – and the audience feels it at that point. There were about three or four discernible songs in the entire movie and those were each maybe a minute or so long. In a feature-length film, that also happens to be a musical, I want to see a little more than a minute or so a song.
I came in wanting to tap my foot, bob my head, or at least have something sang in a great voice. I was in the mood for a musical. What I got, though, was an opera. Which is fine, but even for an opera, this was lacking.
Now, I understand that operas are a bit different than musicals, but this does not make up for the relentless exposition that was being redundantly fed to the audience under the guise that this is very much a “goth” or “rock and roll” song that is not “supposed” to have structure. I understand the nature of the opera is for a character to explain, out loud, what is going on in a certain character’s head, in the scene, or in their relationships; but that does not mean you can drive that point home in a song that repeats the first sentence or sentiment throughout. I want to see growth in a musical number. Someone has to learn something, or some important plot point must come to light during a song. The songs in most artforms that also involve acting are points of emotion. Points where someone wants something, is lamenting something, or just has something to say. Operas are very much speak-talking, which I am perfectly willing to enjoy, but there must be at least a few full-fledged, well thought-out songs that you can take home with you. This movie has none.
If there is any measure of how disappointing this movie is, it is that the best part about it is arguably Paris Hilton. Paris Hilton’s voice is by no means a great one, but it gets the job done for her character. She plays a spoiled heiress of an empire built on human necessity – a huge stretch for her. She seems to immerse her character in the best musical numbers of the movie, and has a scene towards the end where she loses her face and spends the remainder looking like Freddy Krueger trying to look cute. Awesome.
Other than that, this movie really had very little to offer as a story. It had even less to offer as music. The set design was very much gothic in nature and cliched in more ways than one. The costume design was right out of a Hot Topic, and the final dress worn by our antagonist was a little too Lydia Deets. I almost expected a sandworm to come up and swallow someone. This movie could have been the next Rocky Horror Picture Show, a complement to Hedwig, and it could have made a great cult following for itself – but instead has given us another forgettable stab at giving this generation of goth kids something to love other than Johnny Depp and sex. What did Hedwig and Rocky bring to the table that this does not? Great songs.
I tried my hardest to like this movie, if not just because of how much I personally like Anthony Stewart Head, but can find little redeeming value in any of its efforts beyond the superficial gimmick of being futuristic, goth, and stylized so much that you can see why they might have forgotten to make it interesting beyond some mild gore.
Sorry guys, I know a lot of you had high hopes for this one, but it looks like we’ve got another “miss” in the category of movies looking to achieve some kind of modern cult status. If this achieves any kind of cult status, whoever is really into Rocky and Hedwig should be pissed.
Repo! The Genetic Opera will be out in limited release on November 7, 2008. For those of us in LA, it will be playing at the Sunset Five.
