MIFF - The Belko Experiment

Slightly better picture for today's post.

Last night's movie was The Belko Experiment, which was described as Office Space meets Battle Royale. It even has John McGinley in it (Dr. Cox from Scrubs and one of the Bobs in Office Space)! It's a dark-comedy, and very, very bloody, so if gore isn't your thing, give this one a miss. But honestly, what would you expect from a Battle Royale-style movie?

Belko Industries is your typical BusinessCorp™ company, complete with people who don't seem to do much, a guy who spends too long staring at a pretty, female co-worker, nerdy tech people (one of whom plays BigHead in Silicon Valley), gossipy people... you get the idea. The only unusual thing is that it's an American office, in Bogotá, Colombia. They seem to be some kind of not-for-profit organisation, but what they do is unclear.

Not that it really matters. The movie starts with the workers heading into the office, but for some reason, the non-American workers are being sent home, and the guards are different. Everyone's ID is being checked before they enter. It starts off as a fairly normal work day, until an announcement comes over the loudspeaker. "Some of you are going to die. You can reduce that number if you follow my instructions. There are 120 people in the office: kill 2 of them, or 4 will die. Then metal sheets start covering the windows and exits, locking everyone in.

Cue mass panic. The COO, tries to calm everyone down, saying that it's a hoax and that they''ll try to investigate. People split off trying to work out a way to notify someone that they're being held hostage. Then four people at random have their heads blown up. Turns out that the trackers they implanted in the employees to keep them safe in case they got kidnapped are also bombs.

Now that the employees know the terrorists mean business they are given another choice: kill 30 people, or 60 random people will die.

I won't go into the rest of the movie, but it is an interesting question to ask in the office. I first started to think about who on my team would do the best if it were a true last-man-standing Battle Royale situation. Definitely not me, I'm too pacifist to want to kill someone - though I think the point of the movie is that even pacifists will turn deadly if it comes down to it. I'm also not really strong enough to take anyone on 1v1, so my only options are to hide, or to form a group of some kind. I think Jal is pretty self-sufficient. He knows how to take care of himself, and he's a bit of a gun nut - the only problem is that since we live in Australia, nobody is likely to be carrying a gun.

He was the first person I asked, and I was quite surprised by his response. He said the ethical thing would be to try and find a way out of the situation somehow. He didn't even consider trying to work out what would be the fairest way to decide which 30 to kill in order to save 30 others. He suggested banding together and forming a truce. Though he raised the point that people who are parents would probably be focused on not dying, which means they wouldn't want to leave it up to chance that they're not one of the random 60 to die since they don't want to leave their kids to have to fend for themselves. Given the large number of people in the office who are parents, I don't think it would be possible to for a large enough majority of people who are willing to leave their lives up to chance.

MrBrioche likened it to the trolley problem. He said that while it made sense to kill 30 people, as less people would be dying overall, he personally didn't want to have to make that choice. And in reality, 31 people would suffer, as 1 person would probably have to go to jail for the murder of all the other people - though maybe extenuating circumstances would apply here? I don't know if that's a thing when it's not a war or something like that. You couldn't really argue that it was self-defense, even though it is in a way.

Which brings us to the question of how you decide who to kill and who not to kill. I mean, I don't have kids, and it would make sense for me to die, because I have no dependants. MrFodder would survive without me. My genes probably shouldn't be passed along. Then you have the people who have health issues: obesity? short-sightedness? Baldness? Diabetes? That still doesn't rule out that many people on my team. I'd vote smokers next. Elderly?

And even after you've sorted that, how would you do the killing? We have scissors... and one kitchen knife. Oh, I guess there's the fire extinguisher, which you could use to knock someone out. We don't seem to have one of those fire axes, unfortunately. There's the old stick a fork in the power outlet solution, but would that short circuit the system after the first death? And that solution also requires the soon-to-be-dead person's co-operation, which you may not have. There's strangulation, but again, tough to do on someone, and the strangler will have to live with the memory of the deed for the rest of their life - although I doubt anyone is going to make it out of this situation with their mental health intact.

Maybe the best solution would be to have one of the 30 allocated deaths be the one who does the deed. And then as their last act, they stick a fork in the power outlet. So none of the survives have to deal with the memory of taking someone else's life, even though they indirectly have by not stepping in to argue that someone should be saved. I think that's enough distance for most people to be able to rationalise their actions. But this plan still relies on perfect co-operation, so it's fine in theory, would never fly in practice. Which explains why such movies always degenerate into a free-for-all, with the only real alliances being between people who love each other or something sappy like that.

Well. This is more motivation to work out and stay fit!

And the movie was really enjoyable. Pretty gory, which isn't really my thing, but it was enough to make you feel uncomfortable the entire time, but not too much that you just wanted to close your eyes and wait for the movie to be over (like that movie we saw at the Japanese Film Festival that has scarred me for life).