DOWNSIZING

DOWNSIZING. Alexander Payne, director and co-script, with Jim Taylor. Stefania Cella, production design. Norway, USA: Paramount Pictures, Ad Hominem Enterprises, Annapurna Pictures (production) / Paramount Pictures (US distribution), 2017. 135 minutes. For various variant titles, including Pequeña gran vida in Mexico and and Petit format in French for Canada, see IMDb.[1]

(Social) science fiction is that branch of literature which is concerned with the impact of scientific advance upon human beings. — Isaac Asimov "Social Science Fiction" essay (1953), section V

DOWNSIZING could have been a candidate for an epitome of Asimov's social science fiction in its purest form of the One Big Lie: i.e., taking pretty much current society and showing the impact upon it of one significant scientific/technological development, in this case a procedure that reduces human beings and other multicellular beings to literally Lilliputian size, hence in a different kind of literal way reducing the reduced people's carbon footprint and weight/drain upon the environment. For good and for ill, DOWNSIZING is long, up to additional things, and is as much Asimov's "social fiction" as social S.F. — moralizing on current industrialized society through its slightly fictionalized society.

Relevant here are the images of the diminution process, where people are put in groups into a very large machine and reduced in size. See also for the various largely self-contained, largely autonomous towns of the Smalls, finally ending up in an almost-entirely unseen underground city for the Smalls to wait out up to eight thousand years of human-caused environmental collapse on Earth. If we believe this group makes it through — and the rest of the human population does not — the technology of "Downsizing" will have preserved our species from extinction.

RDE, Initial Compiler, 24Dec17