In Delicatessen, the French director Jean-Pierre Jeunet explored cannibalism; in The City of Lost Children, he explored the nature of nightmares; in Micmacs, he explores neocolonialism. Meaning, this is Jeunet's first big attempt to deal with the real world—the world of power, corruption, corporations, racism, poverty, and the exploitation of the global poor and global strife. Jeunet, however, deals with the real world on his own fantastic terms, and the result is a film that is hard to hate but also not easy to embrace. The good people in the film are a group of freaks who live in Paris's underground. The bad people are the arms dealers who make lots of money from wars in desperately poor countries. The struggle is not beautiful but comic, surreal, and often ridiculous. The film's ending is the stuff of dreams. See Movie Times:thestranger.com/film.