Sleep Dealer

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 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.

I liked the film and think it deserves more than a 6.2 so I gave it a high score to try and bump up it's overall score. It deserves about an 8. A really good film that tries to deal with the idea of a dehumanized black economy working for an ever increasingly fascistic USA. Some interesting idea's, some not so interesting. It definitely has a cyberpunk feel but being from Mexico it was always going to be different.

I am unsure of the budget but the film holds it's own and the sfx budget seems to have been spent wisely. The acting was good with the lead and support actors being enjoyable enough to watch. I also liked the score which was essentially Latin pop/dance.

The ending is a little unrealistic given the portrayed future realism of the rest of the film. A good film that is not the greatest sci-fi ever but deserves higher marks considering the obstacles the production team faced. A low budget, sci-fi drama from Mexico is not something you see everyday so it should be applauded.

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