*Given that favelas are on the march all over the world, you'd think there would be a lot more science fiction about our future life in shabby, segregated armed camps run by ethnic narcotics warlords. "Banlieue 13: Ultimatum" is a film of that description. It's one of the few recent science fiction films that would probably be a huge, popular hit in a Rio favela (if the people in there ever paid for movies as opposed to just pirating them).
*The heavily armed dope peddlers in their future Paris ghettos (or the "banlieue") are the good guys in this movie. The bad guys are well-dressed French spooks in the pay of Halliburton. Everything gets solved by really tough, tattooed, transgressive French cops practicing urban parkour and hitting random people with their fists.
*The script was written by Luc Besson. Besson shows such lip-smacking relish for the darkest, most savage and retrograde elements of modern society that I have to conclude that the guy may be an evil genius.
*I saw this movie at the Science Plus Fiction festival in Trieste, so I didn't pay for it, either. Maybe Luc is as broke as the New York Times by now. Or, I dunno, maybe they somehow pay him in bricks of marijuana and gold bars, which are rapidly becoming the two anchor commodities of the modern finance crisis, beloved in both the Chic Favelas and the High Tech Gothic chateaux.
