Sleep Dealer

This movie was excellent and entirely not boring. It gave me chills at certain points. If you know anything about the privatization of water you will overly enjoy this movie. This is a take on how people are not connected to each other anymore and our ignorance/negligence helps large corporations/governments take us over and control us. The movie states a problem and brings about a touching solution with the help of well developed characters.

If you're a movie snob and can't get a useful message out of this film you didn't deserve to waste your money on it..

Watch this movie knowing that not a lot of money was spent on it.. It's not a 150 million dollar budgeted movie.. it used 2.5 million. I think Donnie Darko used about the same amount 7 years ago (to put into perspective). Rivera did an excellent job.

Science fiction as a genre exposes two things about a culture: our hopes for the future, and our fears for the future. What foreign science fiction does for us then is tap directly into the hopes and fears of a culture that is alien to us.

The story of Memo mixes the Mexican condition with a cautious approach to an exciting technology. While "nodes" allow people to directly connect their brains to an Internet of sorts, "sleep dealers" construct cheap, unsafe sweatshops where noders can perform dirt-cheap labor for developed nations, without leaving home.

There are plenty of eye-opening layers of apprehension for the future that are taken straight from the Mexican psyche: the construction of the authoritarian Del Rio Dam in Memo's village echoes the ongoing "water rights" controversies throughout Central America; the closed border with America echoes isolationist fears; the ability of an American corporation to send warships into Mexican villages not only with impugnity but complete openness echoes fears of American corporate-driven hegemony.

Flag-wrapped Americans will deride this movie as Anti-American at worst; cultural ignorance at best. But it is a different sort of cultural ignorance that remains ignorant of the sentiments illustrated in this well-done foreign film.

I can't believe this movie got only a 5.9 on IMDb. If you are someone who thinks, and if you like science fiction, this is a gem. It brings totally new angles to bear on cutting edge social issues; and if you think about what has been presented, you cannot find any flaw in the logic of it, even in the small points. In fact, one leaves the movie fearing that such a world is just around the corner and may be unavoidable. The acting is good and there are no lagging moments; every scene drives the plot. An excellent, deeply satisfying movie worth watching more than once.

Unfortunately I am driven to believe that the reason the rating on IMDb is not higher, is simply that the movie is in Spanish, and north American audiences just are not sharp enough to get it. Perhaps an IMDb rating over 6 is impossible without any car chases or sex crimes.

This is one of those movies that you watch and slowly "connect" to its reality. Many people disliked that. It was either to slow compared to most of the movies today or too intense an experience to people that don't like the feeling of immersion into something else. However, from what I am sitting, it was a great movie.

First of all, one must take a step back from the usual reviewer practice and take into account that all the actors in the movie are Mexican and so is the writer/director. I don't know what budget the movie had, but it was well done in acting, atmosphere, plot, details and special effects. Winning the Sundance festival (and not being about crazy people) should also count in its favor.

Second of all, I really enjoyed the movie. It has the feel of films like Blade Runner, only it hits really closer to home. Luis Fernando Peña was a real good choice for the main role, even if it wasn't a very challenging one. As in many good movies, the main character was the idea, the plot, and the actors were just slipping into their niche.

Bottom line: this is a sci-fi movie that needs to be seen. Whatever faults it has, they are far surpassed by its qualities. The social message is just as important as the vision of a future where we can have whatever we wish for, only that we wished wrong. See it. It is worth it.

Sleep Dealer takes place in tijuana,Mexico, in a not so distant future.The world is heavily militarized, the boarders are closed and there's a global computer network to which people connect(trough nodes in their skin) that makes several kind of experiences possible like upload of memories and cyber labor.When Memo, a young man, accidentally gets his father killed; he decides to go to the city and look for a job. Soon he decides to get nodes implanted...Sleep Dealer is a very legitimate take on the future by the director Alex Rivera and at the same time it deals with some interesting issues like globalization,immigration and the coexistence of humans and technology.Obviously since this is a low-budget movie, the special effects are not impressive and a bit dated but that shouldn't keep you from enjoying this flick.The acting is average, what is truly great here is the premise,the inspiration behind all of it and the very smart concept of the movie. With a big budget and more resources this movie could had been truly amazing. Having said that, if you're a fan of sci-fi movies this is definitely a must-see.

7/10