Edinburgh International Film Festival

Sleep Dealer, a new movie by Mexican director Alex Rivera, is set in a dystopian future of the United States and Mexico, where water is never free and cheap labor is provided by high tech sweat shops in Tijuana. The workers are “plugged in” to a matrix like machine that lets them control robots remotely all over the United States, performing jobs for low wages and without ever stepping foot into the country. The main character, Memo Cruz, lives outside Tijuana on his family’s dried up farm. Once a flourishing farm with plenty of crops and water, the farm is now dead, due to a company which purchased the river and dammed it to prevent the locals from obtaining free water. The company now charges obscene amounts for drinking water, and Memo’s family is almost bankrupt. Through a tragic series of events, Memo ends up going to Tijuana to work for the sleep dealer factory, where he is plugged in and works exhausting 12 hour shifts. He makes a friend who takes an special interest in his story, and they work together toward revolution.
This film, at first look, is interesting and has a good cast. The bar scenes are funny, and the CGI used isn’t too shabby. However, on second glance, one realizes the film is a rip off of several science fiction series already filmed and produced. The plugs that connect the human to the machine are virtually identical to those seen in the matrix movies. The dystopian elements are the same used in film and literature for more the seventy-five years. The computers remind one of the Tele-screen of George Orwell’s 1984. The film appears to be a complete rip off, in story and vision, except the fact that it is a Mexican cast and a Spanish language film, which is somewhat unusual for the genre. The ending is disappointingly anticlimactic, and doesn’t deliver the promised revolution. I give the film one and a half stars, for lack of originality and sheer boredom.