Canada/USA/Germany/Ireland. 2025.
Crew
Director/Screenplay – Timo Vuorensola, Producers – Andreas R. Klein, Marko Möllers, Doris Pfardrescher & Juris Razgulajevs, Photography – Anton Barkarski, Music – Ryan Otter, Prosthetics Design – Aleksey Chernykh, Production Design – Dmitry Malich. Production Company – Art Galaxy/Well Go/Splendid Film/Studio Atlantic.
Cast
Tom Felton (Leon), Aggy K. Adams (Mira), Richard Brake (Senator Frank Kessler), Liza Bugolova (Chloe), Igor Jijikin (Captain Hughes)
Plot
It is sixty-five years after the outbreak of nuclear war. The world has been rebuilt as a utopia where there are two classes – The Genetics, those who have been genetically modified, and The Specials, those with whom the modifications have not worked and live in shantytowns. The wheelchair-ridden Leon is one of the Specials who lives with his niece Chloe and works as a mechanic. Leon conducts a scam to steal cuttings from The Genesis Flower, the miracle invention of a flower that provides energy to the cities, and uses these to power the mechanical implants and prostheses of other Specials. He is offered a repair job at triple pay only to enter a restaurant and see the patrons being slaughtered by the Anti-Genetics terrorists. Leon tries to use the suit he has come to fix to defeat the attackers but is too awkward in it. He makes an escape after seeing that the Anti-Genetics are actually a front run by the security services. Rebuilding the suit to allow him to walk and grant him powers, he and Chloe set out to prevent the Anti-Genetics from attacking the pop singer Mira. To save her, they must abduct her. They then uncover a scheme to euthanise the Specials to further enhance the abilities of The Genetics.
Finnish director Timo Vuorensola emerged in the late 1990s with a series of Star Trek parody fan films, culminating in the feature-length Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning (2005), a film released for free online that came with a series of homemade effects that rivalled those of any Hollywood studio. Vuorensola followed this with his Nazis on the Moon film Iron Sky (2012) and its sequel Iron Sky: The Coming Race (2019), both taking full advantage of visual effects studios that Vuorensola has assembled from scratch.
On the other hand, there is Timo Vuorensola the breakthrough director who subsequently signed on to a series of films that feel as though they have gone from state of the art effects to works made with minimal effort and competence – the poor taste venture into Jeepers Creepers: Reborn (2022), and 97 Minutes (2023), an airline disaster movie that was fairly much laughed off screens and then Altered. Through these, it becomes apparent that Vuorensola has majorly slumped from any of the promise his homemade efforts held.
Altered is a work of Dystopian cinema – that is to say stories that imagine the worst possible future. The idea that Vuorensola generates of a future where the city is idealised but divided between the genetically enhanced and an unmodified underclass bears many resemblances to the much superior Gattaca (1997). Tom Felton’s hero who is wheelchair-ridden but makes himself into a power-suit superhero to take on the system reminds of Upgrade (2018).
The idea of a conceptual mix of Gattaca and Upgrade strikes you as just odd. Even aside from that, Altered is just not a very well made film. There is Tom Felton, a British actor who has for some reason decided to play the entire part with a fake American accent. He stands out because all of the other actors, with the exception of Aggy K. Adams and Richard Brake, are locals from where the film was shot in Kazakhstan and speak English with noticeable accents.
The politics of Altered are no more than the one-dimensional ones that light up an action movie – of championing the underdog against the big evil bad guy who wants to do bad things to the innocent. Perhaps the most ridiculous part of the film though is when Tom Felton goes into action in his power suit and first stumbles around in it like he is clueless. Following an upgrade, his niece decides to give him a flower power theme and so we see him going around blasting people with seeds and then a green chemical cloud. It is maybe one of the lamest superheroic conceptions that one has come across.
It is as though Timo Vuorensola wasn’t even trying. There was a time that I celebrated Vuorensola as a director out there doing original and striking work. It has become sad seeing his slipping from an enthusiastic technical expert who could have sat at the same table as someone like Gareth Edwards to subsisting in no more than the same hack territory that Uwe Boll is usually regarded.
Altered should not be confused with Altered (2006), Eduardo Sanchez’s excellent film about a group of friends who capture an alien.
Trailer here