Mimic

Saw Mimic (thanks, Basil!) It was a fun, messy little sci-fi thriller. The premise is that Scientists have released a sterile insect that mimics cockroaches and poisons them. They've introduced this insect into the wild to control the cockroach population which is spreading some kind of disease (this disease never really comes up in a meaningful way and is clearly an excuse to introduce the super-bugs.) So anyway, mysterious deaths are happening and clearly the super-bugs are bad in some way, so it's up to a brilliant entomologist woman and her CDC-employed husboyfriend to figure out what's up. Along the way are also an autistic boy and a curmudgeonly metro-cop. Also, we're in New York city.

The film is fairly unsurprising. We see, for example, that the autistic boy is good at imitating clicking noises and soon we see the super-insects clicking at each other and from there it's only a matter of time until the talent solves some problem. The obviousness of the setup robs the actual solution of any fun. The film is never really shocking but it is exciting and entertaining however, so it's definitely not a total wash.

Also, to its credit, the film does do some clever things: there's a sequence where the entomologist explains how a termite mound works, playfully calling it a "palace." There are subliminal but inescapable parallels between the tunnels of the termites and the human-constructed subways, where the film mostly takes place. There's also less clear connections between the castes of insects and the strictly demarcated jobs of the humans (the boyfriend in particular, spends a lot of time in bureaucratic turf-wars with cops and metro-cops and officials. I got the sense of teams at work.)

More interesting is the way the film tries to horrify us with the inhuman calculation of the insects. If a soldier dies, what matter to the colony? How ghastly, right? But when the going gets serious, everyone starts nobly sacrificing themselves for the greater good. Is this a slip-shod self-contradiction or a clever irony? I can't really tell. I also can't really tell what all of the Christian iconography is for. Crucifixes and priests feature heavily. A church is the site of the first infestation and glittering crosses pop up a few times throughout. Perhaps the film was establishing a theme of self-sacrifice which I mis-identified as a mechanic being used to creep us out about the insects? Maybe? If so, then this theme doesn't really go anywhere. Then again this film was apparently subjected to a lot of executive meddling, so maybe some larger point got lost in the shuffle.

Anyway, the film is not terribly surprising to me. The monster was novel but there are no real twists or turns. The film is exciting and fairly fun however.