When I saw a trailer on YouTube for a YouTube Red movie called The Thinning, I was intrigued. Earth has few resources left, and in order to help stem the bleeding, as it were, the UN decreed that nations across the globe must cut their population by 5% each year. Everyone does it differently, but in the US, the decision was to only keep the brightest and the best. Every year, students take a test. And every year, the students with the lowest scores don’t go home.
The movie stars YouTuber Logan Paul as Blake Redding who has decided he’s had enough of the awful testing, and Peyton List as Laina Michaels, one of highest scoring students at the school. Together they set out through the school to find out just what the hell is happening with the tests and make some disturbing discoveries that continue much further along than you think (though guessing is possible).
It’s one of those concepts that, at first glance, look like it would be purely speculative. Kill off elementary kids? High school students? Absurd! Parents and people wouldn’t stand for it! But we’ve seen horrors in the past carried out by humans without a second glance — concentration camps in particular. And given enough time and coaxing, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if it became a kind of slow acceptance. Hey, the neighbor’s kid didn’t make it, but at least yours did, and that’s all you’d care about. Move on, head down, look forward to next year. Especially when you see the indoctrination the kids get when they’re little, as a teacher plays them a cutesy animated video showing them why the Thinning is a-okay.
But it’s also made clear not everyone is fine with the test. Teachers get teary-eyed about losing students. Parents start to get royally pissed when they can’t see their kids after the lockdown of the school fails to lift. Yet all the same, they go through with it because it’s still essentially the norm, and who are they to speak out against it?
Initially I thought it was a dystopian movie in which the classic boy-girl duo was set to take down the system. I wondered, if they did, then what would the new 5% culling method be? I mean, we still have to keep the overcrowding problem on the planet to a minimum, right? So already it’s an interesting conundrum — screw the system, screw the planet. But as things continued, you realize that’s not the goal. Everything here is self-contained, happening within the bubble of the school. Corruption occurs in places you may not initially think of, but then realize would absolutely happen, such as girls allowing themselves to be used by teachers in the hopes of getting a passing grade. Others will come as no surprise, like the star quarterback sliding by without any problems. There are a lot of little things happening in this movie aside from just the main two characters running through the school, and I appreciate that.
There are, of course, some typical dystopian tropes. Boy-girl flirtation, though I also appreciate that it was only touched upon and wasn’t a heavy feature in the movie. There just wasn’t time for that, and it didn’t make sense to smash more in, so they didn’t, and it worked. Mason King, the head of security (or testing? Or the school? Now that I think about it, I’m not 100% sure) was as stereotypical as could be, and of course he’s surrounded by disturbing-looking guards that seem to have no other reason than to be scary-looking dystopian guards — complete with slightly warped, deeper-than-necessary voices for effect. But, again, it’s one of those things where you think, “Eh, why not?” and move on. Though honestly? I’d rather have that actor (Michael Traynor) in the role of Kylo Ren because yikes. That dude angry and with a light saber? No, thank you.
At not quite an hour and a half, it’s a good length for what it sets out to do. It may not be a big budget film, but I enjoyed it. While others might give it sass for being a YouTube-based movie and complain about the acting (which I didn’t have any problem with, by the way), I’ll take this over another Tom Cruise movie any day of the week.
Interesting. I’ve heard of Logan Paul but not this movie.
“I mean, we still have to keep the overcrowding problem on the planet to a minimum, right? So already it’s an interesting conundrum — screw the system, screw the planet.”
Same conundrum with the recent Netflix film “What Happened to Monday?” with Noomi Rapace, which is also about state-mandated population control.
I want to watch that Netflix movie!!!
Interesting, I hadn’t heard of that one. Guess I should go check it out!
Just by limiting the amount of children people are allowed to have, to two, would result in each generation getting smaller(because not everyone gets children in their lifespan and some dies young) and the world population to decrease. If you limit it to one child/family the population would start declining fairly fast as each generations numbers would be less than half of the one that gave birth to them. It wouldn’t have to be this drastic or bloody to control the world population and avoid shortages, poverty and environmental problems. Now if things get so bad that you have to start executign people then chances are they will commit suicide or start some kind of public unrest and get lots of people killed til there are few enough… Or there would be wars tinning the population. Just not having as many children seems like a very humane solution to a problem that actually threatens the existance of the human race and pretty much every other species on this planet. Also consider the world people would have to live in, in a post collapse world if there were survivors. Because humans don’t die easy, they cling til the last bit of resource and animal is dead or they get killed themselves, or take their own lives.
With population control:
The children who are born get better chances at education, work and everything else along with a brighter safer future for them and their children. You don’t need to kill anyone, just make sure limits are keept. Guess you can’t do anything triplets or quadruplets when it happens naturally but it should be rare enough for it not to be a problem,
Oh absolutely there are plenty of other reasonable solutions that don’t involve straight up murder, no doubt about that.
But then we wouldn’t have a movie. 😉 Likewise, the end of the movie begs a sequel (which will probably never happen given Logan Paul’s infamy) which actually contradicts the main plot point the movie is centered around anyway.