I kept thinking throughout of Lord of the Flies. And High-Rise was definitely lacking in comparison. First, the ending is indeed silly and requires not so much suspension, as rather a brutal murder of disbelief and a sigh, "Ah, it's a parable/allegory/whatever!"
Then again, Golding's novel is a parable, too, but it presents fascinating evolution of his characters. You could see them slowly deteriorating into cruelty and into being feral (and by the end of it, some of them do forget about having had another life and about things ever being different, but the island setup makes it much more believable). In High-Rise, there was no evolution, really, and not much by way of motives or reasons, or anything. It was just "here is this jumble of bits and pieces. This is what people are like. Take it or leave it." I kinda got it from everything I've read and seen before. And piling up gory details does not make it a revelation. No, I have not read the original novel (I am not a great fan of 20th century literature as most of what I read of it could be described as pretentious, boring, and utterly predictable disappointments with several stark exceptions, like Golding, Huxley, and a few other writers not many people ever heard of), and now I am unlikely to read it. Yet the film must stand on its own, and in my opinion, it not so much stood as wobbled in too many directions.
The problem with Ballard's misanthropy, as I see it, is not all that blood and carnage, but the fact that he seems not to be really interested in his characters. I don't think you can be really interested in what you don't like. Consequently, there is not much to interest the viewer.
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