You haven’t seen anything exactly like the new sci-fi film from Academy Award-winners Matt Damon and Alexander Payne. The creator of incredible motion pictures such as Sideways, The Decedents, and About Schmidt, Payne has long been a director worth watching for his unique blend of strikingly stark imagery, trenchant social satire, and jet black humor. This blend is so well suited to the genre of science fiction that it is somewhat surprising that Payne hasn’t taken a stab at sci-fi before now.
However, if the recently released trailer is any indication, Downsizing is far from your typical sci-fi fare. The trailer depicts a world in which a truly fantastic new technology has become commonplace. As a solution to a human population growth rate that has become out of control, scientists have developed a way to shrink human beings down to a height of only 5 inches.
At this dramatically reduced scale, people consume far less resources, which is obviously great for the environment. But that’s not the only benefit of the “downsizing” process. As the Matt Damon character Paul and his wife Audrey (played by Kristen Wigg) soon discover, there are personal financial benefits as well. In the downsized world, which features downsized versions of everything from mansions to sports cars, their combined income of $152,000 converts to a whopping $12.5 million!