This is a strange one folks, but just strange enough. On the surface it seems to be railing against the institute of advertising. From just that level, it is a bit flat.

On the level of sci-fi, one can see the suggestion that the brands are alien monsters bent upon domination of earth. We have been bought and sold to feed their needs.

Underneath this though, is a much deeper message - one of our own personal consumerism. In the West we believe that we are free, but this movie, using a surrealistic approach, questions that for us. It's been said that you can get addicted to anything, even your favorite soda. So, what are you addicted to? Where have you, moment by moment, given up your life?

Will you like this movie? Not if you just want to sit back and be entertained. It does have a decent plot, and good acting, as well as decent CGI. What it doesn't have is an easy to swallow, cookie-cutter script.

But it definitely wasn't as bad as some of the reviews are saying. I think some of the reviews are being sensational in how bad it is, but I guess to each his own.

Overall, movie is about a guy who works as an advertising genius and decides to leave all the money and glamor behind when he starts realizing that his deeds are leading to people being hurt by his actions. While in hiatus from the city life on a farm in the Russian countryside (did I mention this is a Russian movie?) he has some sort of revelation about a ritual that came to him in a dream. After he performs it, he finds himself back in the city only to see physical representations of how advertisements and marketing are sucking the will power out of people, becoming slaves to the system (this is where most of the trailer footage comes from). When he figures out what he's seeing, he ends up formulating a plan of using the same tactics used to turn people into cattle to crush the forces that enslave human will...but at what cost?

Overall, I have to say, there's lots of loose ends, subplots with no payoff, a relationship play that could've been left on the cutting room floor and many other elements that sort of add too much noise to the main story, almost to the point that there IS no main story, just a series of events that finally lead to the credits rolling. However, I was entranced by the randomness of the movie overall and found it's quirkiness charming. It's that same randomness that caused the hate-fest on the movie, so knowing this, it's not as bad as reviews say, but it's definitely noticeable.

However, I firmly believe that this movie was the victim of post production tinkering. Even comparing trailer 1 to 2, you can tell that even the people making the trailer were trying to shift the advertising campaign so as not to completely anger it's possible audience after seeing the movie. This begs the question: What was the original story? And why does Sydow (who never has any direct contact with the protagonist and apparently has no reason to be in the movie at all) get vaporized by lightning? This one scene alone speaks volumes as to how editing can kill a movie. Even if the original movie they shot wasn't good, editing that story into a completely different one cannot save the movie and in this case, although it was quirky in it's weirdness, completely destroyed any sense of completeness.

It's not unwatchable, but it's certainly far from being anything coherent.

So, I've been seeing the ads for this film for a while now, and it always looked like a really interesting concept. Even looking at IMDb's summary of the film sells it as a sort of science fiction film.

Nothing you see in the ads or read in the summaries has anything to do with the actual film.

While the footage from the ads featuring strange creatures that seem to embody brands and feed off the desires of the populous for the brand is indeed in the film, it takes more than half the film to get to that point. The first half of the film shows the protagonist as marketing executive who gets caught as a pawn in a scheme to make fast food brands more popular. Throughout this section of the film, there is no indication that you'll ever see any of the footage that has been presented in the ads.

After the halfway point, the story radically shifts gears and we finally start to see the images that sold us on the film. However, it must be made clear that this isn't the story, and in fact the climax seems very strange compared to the first half of the film. Each brand has it's own weird monster, which really might be nothing more than the protagonist hallucinating (it's never really made clear and no one else ever sees or acknowledges these monsters), and eventually the monsters fight. However, again, there's no indication that any of it's really going on save in the protagonists head.

Now, that said, the movie itself is pretty interesting. I think that if they had sold it as what it really is, it might attract the right audience for it. As it is, the movie is being marketed solely around it's climax which has a drastic tone and premise shift from the rest of the film. Yes, there is a narrator who seems to be the filmmakers short cut, but it doesn't really add much to the film and every now and again seems inappropriate. The film felt long, but that may be because a part of you is waiting for the movie you expected to see to start.

Over all, this may be more of a Netflix rental for most people. It's not the movie it wants you to think it is, and it's not the movie you expect it to be. However, if you can get past the downright dishonest marketing, the movie isn't half bad. It has a lot of flaws, and the end of the film feels like it needed some sort of biting twist that was hinted at, but never fully arrived.

I don't regret seeing it, but I wish I'd waited until I could pay less to see it.