Dream Machine: Review. By George & Josh Bate.
From the inception of the genre, science fiction has used technological advancements and fantastical storytelling elements to comment on contemporary, real-world issues. In literature, George Orwell explored surveillance and totalitarianism in his seminal sci-work 1984, while Ray Bradbury examined censorship and the growing influence of technology on society in Fahrenheit 451. In cinema, the likes of Ex Machina, Minority Report, and even Jurassic Park have toyed with tenets of the sci-fi genre to provide poignant messaging about real-world problems that demand our attention presently. In the new short film Dream Machine, filmmaker Dan Egan follows suit in blending a grounded story with a heightened concept to shine a light on a long-standing yet increasingly relevant problem.
Dream Machine follows Marco (Javier Ronceros), a veteran autoshop mechanic who struggles to make a living in a near-future dominated by the commercial success of flying cars. Marco’s occupational struggles bleed into his marriage with wife Isabela (Rosa Delgado) and lead him to consume excessive alcohol to help numb the stress. As the rift in his marriage widens, Marco is presented with a novel opportunity that may save him from his troubles.
Writer/director Dan Egan fuses high-concept sci-fi with a grounded aesthetic in a manner similar to Rian Johnson’s Looper and Michael Felker’s Things Will Be Different. Initially, the world in which Dream Machine takes place looks and sounds exactly like ours, featuring a run down mechanic shop that will look all too familiar to anyone who has ever visited the U.S. But it doesn’t take long for the camera to pan out and reveal that this isn’t our contemporary world – at least not yet. A string of flying cars journey throughout the sky far above and away from the autoshop, both literally and figuratively.
The aesthetic Egan arrives on in Dream Machine is delightfully retro-futuristic. The visual effects from VFX supervisor Texas Loveday don’t aim for realism, rather they are purposefully old-fashioned and even surreal looking. The flying cars themselves look like the crimson red Christine from John Carpenter’s classic horror film, while the VFX that brings these cars to life have a Tim Burton, almost stop-motion quality about it. It’s an interesting juxtaposition to the otherwise grounded world Marco and Isabela live in, one that blends our real world with a flavor of retro futurism not dissimilar from Tomorrowland and even this summer’s The Fantastic Four: First Steps.
This juxtaposition speaks to just how unnatural the development of flying cars are and how deleterious this development is for the livelihoods of people like Marco. Although the short features barely any dialogue from any character, including Marco, our protagonist is an instantly relatable character with a disturbingly relatable plight. Marco’s struggles serve as a simple, yet effective allegory for the ways in which technological advancements swallow up certain occupations and people, leaving them behind to fend for themselves. History has seen this happen with assembly-line workers, switchboard operators, lamplighters, travel agents, video rental store clerks, and so on and so on. Currently, the dawn of AI is already seeing certain occupations, such as drivers, legal assistants, and proofreaders, dissipate before our eyes. Dream Machine taps into this dread of a looming future through Marco, who sees his role as a mechanic slowly slip away. Again, like the very best sci-fi stories, Egan’s short film manages to highlight an issue that demands our attention through a more fantastical storytelling lens.
As the short progresses, the story becomes even more heartbreaking as the depths of Marco’s difficulties are revealed to the audience. His turn to alcohol to drown out his pain has an effect on his wife and co-worker Isabela, but, as seen in so many marriages, she hesitates to name the elephant in the room. The way their relationship is conveyed by Egan speaks to the short’s more solemn, quiet, even minimalist tone, which fits well for a film of this length (~18 minutes) in that it doesn’t overstay its welcome. If Dream Machine were to be expanded into a feature film, one would expect it would have to stretch beyond its current tone, but, as it stands, Egan finds success with how he tells this story.
Ultimately, the story unfolds in an emotional and admirable manner that inspires, even if it doesn’t offer some profound message to the issue it examines. This may be Egan’s point, however. The problems caused by rapid technological advancements don’t have a readily available solution and, as such, Marco’s problem does not have a readily available solution. Instead, Marco is only in control of the decisions that lay before him, which may not solve the problem, but at least can allow him to adhere to his moral code.
With a distinct visual style blending our real world with retro-futuristic, old-fashioned VFX and a story that is as relevant today as it would have been 50 or even 100 years ago, Dream Machine makes for an aesthetically interesting and thematically poignant short film.
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