If Campbell Scott's low-budget, low-yield science-fiction chamber piece Final is to be believed, it's time to invest heavily in bubble-wrap futures, because the industrialized world has yet to scratch the surface of the packaging material's myriad applications. Produced as part of the InDigEnt project, a digital-filmmaking collective commissioned by the Independent Film Channel to make 10 features for roughly $100,000 apiece, Final uses bubble wrap like duct tape, as an all-purpose solution to a budgetary problem. But at a time when science fiction belongs almost exclusively to CGI wizards, the film's most crucial innovation is in considering the future as it exists in the mind, not necessarily how it looks on the screen. While it's rare to see a science-fiction film centered on ideas rather than effects, Scott and screenwriter Bruce McIntosh run out of the former too quickly, and end up settling for a turgid melodrama with a needlessly souped-up premise. Confined mostly to a drab room inside a concrete Connecticut asylum, Denis Leary does some of his signature pacing and ranting as a committed schizophrenic who believes he was cryogenically frozen in 1999 and thawed out 400 years later. When asked to explain why nothing has changed in four centuries, from televisions to automobiles to coldly bureaucratic hospital administrators, Leary claims the government has created an elaborate hologram designed specifically to deceive him. Hope Davis plays his therapist, a patient and even-tempered young woman who tries to gain his trust while fighting off her personal feelings for him. Leary's paranoid suspicion that he's being primed for a final, lethal injection gives the relationship urgency, but the science-fiction elements are relegated to the background of the conventional (if somewhat affecting) intimacy that develops between doctor and patient. As in the wonderful Big Night, which he co-directed with Stanley Tucci, Scott coaxes nuanced performances out of both actors, but he can't make sense of McIntosh's mannered, Mametian dialogue, which dances maddeningly cryptic circles around even the simplest piece of information. Scott and McIntosh might have taken a cue from the underrated indie comedy Happy Accidents, which sweetened a similarly time-warped relationship with arrestingly goofy conjectures about the future. Though partially redeemed by a doozy of a twist in the second act, Final gets bogged down in Kafka-esque mindgames, hauling around a portentous tone that it doesn't have the legs to support.