Humanity Bureau (2018) - Review

 Humanity Bureau is a sci-fi/thriller that stars Nicolas Cage as Noah Kross, a government worker in a post-second civil war America, who is tasked with evaluating the "efficiency" of certain individuals to determine if they deserve to remain in their communities or if they are to be relocated to a rehabilitation community referred to as "New Eden". After killing a former politician who was violently resisting the relocation to New Eden, Kross is tasked with evaluating a mother and child, Rachel and Lucas (Sarah Lind & Jakob Davies). Because of the interaction with the politician before and learning that New Eden might not be as benevolent as the government makes it out to be to its citizens, Kross decides to go rogue and try and save this mother and child from certain death from the government that he had faithfully served for years. 

This movie is a victim of its own ambition. The various locations that the trio travel to are only identified as being located in a war-ravaged area by being vacant of any people in a desert-like location. But beneath the very poor set design and direction is a script that tries to expose the humanity of a very plausible, at the time (2018), future of America based upon the fears and anxieties present in the country fomenting for decades. The future government that rules this new country is a mix of the fears of both liberal and conservative ideologies in America - it is a corporate-like fascist country that has placed the value of its citizens onto their own abilities to provide value to society. By way of analogy, Humanity Bureau is a less-developed and less thoughtful Minority Report. I don't like to compare movies to one another very often, but it is difficult to avoid the comparison when an iterative product does not accomplish what a similar product has done before. Humanity Bureau fails to introduce the audience what the main concern to the protagonist is in the way that similar movies do. This may be a strong twist if it wasn't already clear that New Eden is a location where individuals are killed so that society can preserve its resources for the "more productive" or "more efficient". The only clarity that is obtained at the reveal of the twist is that New Eden is in fact a real place, but it is a death camp patterned after Nazi activities during WWII. The tension that is felt during the movie from Cage's Kross is him not wanting to tell this family the true nature of the settlement. By the time it is made clear why the tension exists, I felt beaten down, suffering through the slightly better than Birdemic: Shock and Terror quality computer graphics and set design. 

I frankly was exhausted to care by the end of the movie as to its conclusion because of all of these factors coming into concert. As I had said above, there is a human story that wants to be told at the heart of the movie, but it fails to break out of the limitations of its own budget and scope. I can see the appeal of telling the story of a post-apocalyptic America and an Edenic Canada in the context of an United States that is going through an existential leadership crisis. The movie would have suffered even more if the script aged even further and lost its relevance before it could attain the budget and talent needed to bring it to life. Cage's Kross is a fairly sympathetic character throughout the movie, but the other factors involved wore me down and I eventually stopped caring before the end of the movie came to pass. I would understand watching this movie as a matter of completeness, much as I am doing now, but I would not recommend my worst enemy to expose themselves to this product.