Downsizing (Alexander Payne, 2017)

Matt Damon decides to have himself shrunk to five inches in height to dramatically save on living expenses (and his carbon footprint, as the film pointedly keeps underlining). His wife chickens out of the process at the last minute, so he's left by himself in a city of other little people. So far, fine as the concept goes, and the natural way for this to proceed is as sci-fi comedy centring on the drawbacks of being tiny, with perhaps some touch of melancholia as the dream life turns out to be less than what was hoped for. Failing that, taking the route of the classic '50s B-movie The Incredible Shrinking Man, which plays with the miniature person conceit until logically and bleakly ending in existential oblivion.
But no, Payne wants to use the concept as a vehicle to deliver a message on ecological collapse and the impending extinction of the human race. Damon gets equipped as politically correctly as possible with a strident Vietnamese cleaner and amputee girlfriend, Christoph Waltz out-Schinkens all his previous performances (and that really takes some doing) as his face-pulling Serbian black marketeer mate and then they go to Norway to hear an impassioned speech by the scientist who invented the shrinking process and is taking the little people underground to continue the human race after the rest of it has been wiped out by some vaguely predicted combination of disasters.
The ingredients for something idiosyncratically interesting are all there at the outset - a director with a solid track record of quiet dramas with substance, such as The Descendants or Nebraska, a starting premise offering many avenues to go down and a capable cast. How it ends up as such a cringeworthy mess is quite a feat.

4/10