Maya EntertainmentReview in a Hurry: Mexican cyberpunk, y'all! Imagine if the robots in WALL-E were controlled by the online consciousnesses of illegal immigrants, and you'll have some idea what Sleep Dealers is getting at. Occasionally shaky effects are the biggest drawback in a mostly smart sci-fi cautionary tale.
The Bigger Picture: In the near future, when national borders are virtually impenetrable, dirt-poor Mexicans are still able to make money in the U.S. by implanting their bodies with "nodes" and jacking in to an Internet that allows their minds to control worker robots stateside, albeit at the cost of progressively draining a person's life energy.
In the small Mexican town of Santa Ana del Rio, now ironically named as the rio has been dammed up so that U.S. corporations can sell the water back to the locals at an obscene markup, young Memo Cruz (Luis Fernando Peña) is trying to tap into the larger grid using homemade technology. When he does, and the U.S. government detects it, his home is instantly marked as a terrorist site and destroyed, leaving Memo to head to Tijuana where he might make enough money to support his surviving relatives.
There, he gets jacked in and seeks work in a border factory as the guiding consciousness behind a skyscraper-building robot in San Diego. Meanwhile, he finds romance with a beautiful local (Leonor Varela), whose ulterior motive is to sell her memories of him online.
Writer-director Alex Rivera has enough good ideas to keep the story moving forward, effectively satirizing both the global economy and the narcissism of today's online society. It's unfortunate that the low-budget digital effects are occasionally quite awful...though they hold up in scenes where it really matters.
If you can forgive a little visual creakiness, however, the storytelling is quite good...and it wouldn't be too surprising to see Rivera snapped up by a big studio to do a comic-book adaptation in the relatively near future.
The 180—a Second Opinion: Immigration purists are unlikely to be happy with the implication that closed borders could have extremely detrimental effects—or that the U.S. government occasionally exaggerates threats from perceived enemies.