In Downsizing, Alexander Payne’s big idea is to try to treat his film’s title as literally as possible, positing a world where a Norwegian scientist has invented a shrink ray that can reduce organic matter to a thousandth of its original size. Why? Well, since we can’t enlarge the Earth and its finite resources, maybe we can shrink ourselves to make them last longer. We’re conditioned these days to assume that the stakes of any story are the whole world, which goes double in a story with an environmentalist conceit. But Downsizing isn’t about saving the world. Downsizing is neither an environmental screed nor a skewering of environmentalist rhetoric; it simply builds a world and tries to imagine Matt Damon living in it. by Vince Mancini