CrawlerChunky In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

ThedevilChoose When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

AshUnow This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

Kaelan Mccaffrey Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

jwcstorage 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.

cabyma Advantageous boldly confronts the obsession with female youth, in a world where aging women have little to no job opportunities as the economy is built upon the idea that young female beauty is the standard, thus producing income for corporations, and that aging beauty is worthless, thus leading aging women without means to support themselves. How intelligent of Jennifer Phang to confront Hollywood and movie critics on these very issues they continue to perpetuate. A woman's heart-wrenching but ultimately beautiful sacrifice for her daughter is enough to provide hope in a world of unrealistic beauty standards and the continued sexualization of young women. I eagerly await what Jennifer Phang has in store for us next.

darrenleethorneburns In the near future where older women are increasingly marginalized, a middle- aged single mother who works as a spokesperson for a Bio-Medical firm faces losing her job as the company look to bring in a younger replacement.Faced with being unable to provide for her talented daughter she agrees to undergo the extreme and experimental medical procedure the company has developed that would see her consciousness transferred to the body of a younger woman.Excellent, relevant science-fiction with beautiful performance from Jacqueline Kim as the mother and Samantha Kim as the daughter.Rivals Ex Machina as the best sci-fi movie of recent years.

Matt Kracht 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.