0/5 stars. Avoid at all costs.
This movie is so bad I’m not going to name it, because that would risk being responsible for you seeing it to see if it’s “so bad it’s good”. The central concept is a poor man’s Total Recall with a drug swapped out for the big glowy chair.
The protagonist feels responsible for her brother’s near drowning and is motivated by a desire to bring him out of a coma. She does some sketchy stuff, basically kills her boyfriend, is betrayed by her business partner, and suffers through a lot before she heals enough to complete her character growth by killing her brother.
She deserves every bad thing that happened to her over the course of this ninety minute small studio sci-fi flick. It’s really a 45 minute movie padded out with a LOT of languid slo-mo artistic shots that feel meant to convey an intellectual depth the movie lacks.
Two other things the movie doesn’t understand are drugs and the prison system, for much the same reason. As central a role as time plays in the movie, you’d think the producers would have spent a little more effort understanding the role of time in drug use and incarceration. It focuses solely on the personal effects of the passage of time. Drug users aren’t looking to prolong their experiences – the heavy ones are used to dull one’s senses to it’s passage. They let the user escape for hours into nothing. A drug that lets them experience hours of life in a minutes is the OPPOSITE effect. And prisons aren’t just instruments of cruelty for the sake of cruelty. Incarceration is also meant to protect society from the presence of the criminal for awhile. It does no one any good to inflict a year’s worth of time on a criminal in minutes only to put them back out on the streets instantly. That whole subplot reeks of bleeding heart, first order thinking and is a gross misunderstanding of the criminal justice system.
It misunderstands:
- how sentencing works
- how due process works
- how prison systems operate
- how punishment is justified
- how rehabilitation is evaluated
- how solitary confinement affects cognition
Most of these flaws are likely the result of being heavily funded by (foreign, to me) government entities. And not the BBC for once, but a kindred spirit. The sort of government that thinks killing the helpless is a noble thing and that it’s mean spirited and cruel to inconvenience rapists and murderers.
Oh, and speaking of government funded poison, credit where credit is due: the most prescient thing about this pre-plandemic movie is the way it envisages governments enthusiastically embracing dangerous and untested drugs in the hopes of inflicting them on an unwilling population.
The “dumb guy’s idea of a smart movie” is capped off several times when movie lines that sound deep in the moment undercut the central message of the film. It has a high concept and nibbles around the edges of some interesting concepts, but its intellectual grasp exceeds it’s reach.
And you could forgive it’s shortcomings if it only rested on solid moral ground. Movies compress details for the sake of time. Sci-fi films often gloss over the practicalities of the core concept, and it’s fine. We don’t need to hear the word “nanites” – we just need enough gizmos and doo-dads to make it feel real. A few clunky lines are not a deal breaker, particularly in a low budget offering. But when the film resolves the central tension by having its main character learn to kill again…? What are we even doing here?
Just disappointing all the way around.