Generally speaking, films which are set in the future really have to be "futuristic" in some way, shape or form. "The Gene Generation" is offered as being precisely that, but in its emotional impact and effect it is more like a bad dream from the 1930s, except in color. Lots of color.
The first thing the viewer encounters in this bizarre tale of family loyalty and love lost, is the grim cityscape of the anonymous city where everything happens. There's nothing shiny or bright about it.
Perhaps that was an effort by the author and director to 'locate' the viewer or audience in something at least a little bit familiar. Too bad that the cityscape has approximately as much charm as East Berlin in the mid-1950s !! There's trash everywhere, stuff blows around in circles in the ( seemingly ) never-ending wind, and it's always dark.
It rains. It doesn't rain. It rains. That part of the subtext of this otherwise very ambitious movie really is doubly maddening.
People live in high rise apartment buildings where there's running water and plenty of electricity, and gadgets, but nobody to clear the trash from the hallways. Huh ? The street scenes are the same, with futuristic clutter and debris all over the place, except on the sidewalks where the heroine -- Bai Ling, ravishing at forty-two -- is either walking or running.
Transportation in this urban desolation appears to consist only of elevators and floating-on-air 'flying Dutchmen' type sailing ships.
It all looks really, really strange and inevitably that becomes a nasty impediment to the story line itself, which is actually rather good.
The heroine is an anti-hero, a paid assassin with a brother who is a gambling junkie and a self-destructive idiot. Even his best friend and comrade eventually jettisons him, literally turning his back and then walking away. So, yes, there are touching moments in this otherwise ultra-violent and ultra-cynical story of ultra-modern revenge.
It is hard to recommend this movie for the plot, which is so cynical, and so dark and twisted; but, it is hard not to admire the effort in art and in cinema design which went into creating this futuristic urban hell on earth. That part, or parts, are quite amazing. Is this city located on some other planet, one which merely resembles our earth ?
We will most certainly never know the answer to that question.
Seven out of ten mostly for the delectable and dexterous Bai Ling and also for one truly nasty, skulking-around-places gangster-type villain.
