10 Original Movies To Keep On Your Radar For The Rest Of 2017

4. Downsizing

Downsizing Movie Matt Damon Kristen Wiig
Paramount Pictures

The 'original sci-fi comedy' subgenre is one that's produced some absolute gems in recent years - The World's End, Attack The Block, and even The Martian were considered pretty funny if you were a Golden Globe voter - and Downsizing looks to be the next movie to join those esteemed ranks.

The premise of the movie is relatively simple on paper but has the potential to explore some big issues and produce some big laughs if exploited correctly.

In Downsizing, scientists have discovered how to shrink humans down to just a few inches tall, and, in an effort to counteract global overpopulation, propose a 200-year global transition from big people, to small people. Thankfully, living in a miniaturized world does have its benefits, as Paul Safranek (Matt Damon) and his wife Audrey (Kristen Wiig) come to learn.

Downsizing has been almost 13 years in the making, after director Alexander Payne spent over two years working on the script after the release of his 2004 film, Sideways.

It's somewhat ironic that a film about being small took such a huge amount of time to put together, but that only speaks to the amount of care that's been poured into the project.

Contributor
Contributor

Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!