The future is very bleak in Connected, a sci-fi short film that comes to us from Denmark.

Synopsis

Note: This synopsis is from the official site for this film.

Set in the distant future, Connected is a story about survival and greed with a post apocalyptic wasteland as its backdrop. Survivors of an unknown disaster shuffle through a desolate landscape, as it quickly becomes clear that not everybody has the strength to survive.

Review

You’re probably getting sick of all this bleak post-apocalyptica filling these reviews. After seeing Connected I just couldn’t resist throwing it out there though. Don’t worry, it won’t be all gloom and doom forever.

From the opening titles on we’re treated to a rough, grimy landscape. How it happened isn’t important to the story itself. The world went bye-bye in a big way. It’s bad enough that everyone has to wear complicated breathing apparatuses connected to someone else in order to even go for a stroll through the kibble, but hey, thems the breaks when you’re unlucky enough to survive the end of the world, right?

Unless you’re even less fortunate than that and have to steal your air from someone else. Clean air in this particular world has become one of the most precious commodities there is. Even more valuable than gold one can imagine. And when you’ve got something rare that someone else wants badly enough, they’ll do anything to try and take it. This is a study in human behavior framed inside a post-apocalyptic world, but it could just as easily have been set in the current world of Earth 2011 and still been told just as effectively.

Does that mean it’s less effective because it is in some far-off sci-fi future world? Hardly. Sci-fi like this is some of the best kind of storytelling: we go somewhere else far off to learn something new about ourselves as individuals, societies, and cultures. We can hold the world of Connected up as a mirror to our own. That’s what good science fiction can do. Admittedly it can be an extreme and often warped mirror, but that’s one of the tools used to tell a good story like this.

What did you think of Connected? Leave a comment below.

Information

Genre: Sci-Fi
Country: Denmark
Release Year: 2009
Runtime: 8 min.
Director: Jens Raunkjær Christensen & Jonas Drotner Mouritsen
Produced with: Danish Film Institute / Film Workshop & Camilla Ebling
Cast: Anders Houmann, Tobias Shaw Petersen, Dion Raufort
Website: ov43.com