Having just seen not the whole film but short episodes from the film She Will, I rediscovered FT421 shortly afterwards and thought to compare what I'd seen with the review (page 60) and I can report that Daniel King's review is pleasingly accurate and on point. Atmospheric movie, pretty good review. I was niggled by having seen the central actress Alice Krige somewhere else but I just couldn't place the role. (that's an uncomfortable position to be in, as any Fortean knows. You have to niggle at it until the right neurons are fired, and while the temptation is there to Google.... that's too easy...)
The previous roles DK cited were interesting, but no help. There was something else there, something which in an odd intangible way was also pertinent to the themes of this film. (Woman has double mastectomy after breast cancer and - as you can only partway understand - feels incomplete, traumatised, needing to recover from the ordeal of medical intervention after her body has been surgically altered).
That sensation of a woman who's just been through what really amounts to a medical machine clicked the right neurons into place and synapses fired. It also occurred to me that Daniel King may have deliberately chosen to omit any reference to the single role for which Alice Krige is most famous - the Borg Queen in one of the Star Trek movies.
Thinking about impersonally applied surgery delivered by a medical system with machine-like impersonal aspects to it, of the sort that leaves the recipient feeling invaded and incomplete.... the iconic scene in the Star Trek movie is of Alice Krige's upper body - head, shoulders, and detached spine - being removed from one body and transferred into another, while all the time she is conscious and delivering a long speech to the android Data concerning the inevitable victory of the Borg Collective, and about how Resistance is Futile.
This may, consciously or unconsciously, have been inspired casting for this movie.
