Office Space

What Tristan said:

I recommend that you watch Office Space! This is one of those rare examples of a 20 year old movie that has aged well (especially for a comedy…). While the setting is the late ’90s’ dot-com tech office era, the common office stereotypes that existed at that time still exist today. Sure, they all use CRT monitors and actual floppy disks, but the interpersonal relationships and annoyances are timeless. The supporting story is implausible, but in the spirit of the whole movie as a parody, I don’t think it will take away from the experience.

Mike’s verdict:

This is a movie that by all accounts I should already have seen.  For reasons long forgotten it managed to stay outside my periphery, and eventually reached the point where not seeing it was almost a part of my self-identity: I hadn’t seen it when it was a ‘thing’, so the chance was missed.  In any case, it turns out that all I needed to overturn 20 years of disinterest was an earnest recommendation, so here were are.

The first thing I noticed in this film is how flimsy and drab everything looks.  Compared to modern movies, Office Space makes no effort to create a set with dimension. Both the apartment and the titular office feel thin, unsaturated and empty. Everything looks utilitarian cheap.  But of course it does… it’s the ’90s and the focus is on the employees of a generic company office.  The dullness is very much the point; and while more recently the Googles and Shopifys of the tech world have made some strides, the office building of this film is still extremely familiar.

In fact, everything about Office Space is familiar.  The managers, the cubicle neighbours, the aggravations, the disillusions of the employees, the printers that are always broken; all of it is superbly related-able. The movie is certainly a parody in spirit, but like all good parodies it is firmly grounded in a reality that existed and still exists even two decades later.  Tristan is spot-on – some of the technology looks out-dated, but the characters, and the way they interact, are so distinctly humans-in-an-office that the set doesn’t matter.  Not only does this film not suffer from the anachronistic backdrops at all, if anything they serve as a reminder of the mind-numbing lack of creativity that offices so regularly spiral into.

At the same time, the dialog is hilarious and the supporting cast caricaturizes the personalities of everyday offices perfectly. Everybody is a little over-the-top; but really only a little over-the-top.  Where the film exaggerates, it does so only because it would take too long to depict the “death by a thousand cuts” that drives the motivations of all the main characters.

A supremely enjoyable watch. 10/10