★ 4 / 10
For those unfamiliar with the term “aporia,” it
Brent Marchant
For those unfamiliar with the term “aporia,” it refers to a state of puzzlement or bewilderment, especially in philosophical and ethical discourse. And, in the…
For those unfamiliar with the term “aporia,” it refers to a state of puzzlement or bewilderment, especially in philosophical and ethical discourse. And, in the case of this latest effort from writer-director Jared Moshé, it’s equally applicable to the essence of this film’s existence. This romantic sci-fi saga of a nurse, Sophie (Judy Greer), who loses her engineer/physicist husband, Mal (Edi Gathegi), to a drunk driver follows the efforts to bring him back to life with the assistance of her late spouse’s best friend, Jabir (Payman Maadi), a fellow scientist with whom he was working on a time machine. Unfortunately, the device doesn’t function as intended, but it is nevertheless capable of sending a deadly subatomic particle through time whose impact is capable of killing someone – in this case, the proposed target being the motorist who killed Mal. The prospect poses a daunting ethical dilemma, but Sophie agrees to it, and she soon finds herself back in the company of her husband. But changing the past carries consequences, many of them unforeseen and difficult to deal with. The film presents an intriguing premise, to be sure, but one not unlike what was previously examined in “The Butterfly Effect” (2004). What’s more, this offering is plagued by a number of issues, such as needlessly slow pacing, insightful but overlong ethical debates and a stunningly unsophisticated temporal device that looks like one of Rube Goldberg’s comical contraptions. The biggest problem by far, though, is one of narrative credibility – not from a scientific standpoint but from a moral one: It’s hard to believe that these three supposedly intelligent individuals can be so casual and cavalier when it comes to their ethics and morals. I find it unfathomable how a supposedly compassionate caregiver like a nurse could so willingly go along with a harebrained plan to willfully kill someone for self-serving purposes; it’s a hallow, contrived and patently unbelievable story arc. And, when efforts to make up for this transgression surface, the plot truly starts to go off the rails. Indeed, the logic behind this tale truly needs to be rethought and reworked, because, as it stands now, it genuinely leaves philosophically minded viewers in a deep state of aporia, especially when it comes to figuring out why they bought a ticket to watch it in the first place.
Read full review
★ 7 / 10
Interesting to watch if you supend enough disbelief
ejonconrad
All time travel stories require varying degrees of suspension of disbelief. The only fully self consistent plots involve "closed loop" stories, like…
All time travel stories require varying degrees of suspension of disbelief. The only fully self consistent plots involve "closed loop" stories, like Predestination, but those require us to give up on the concept of free will. Some are just incredibly stupid (Looper comes to mind). On the scale of things, Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure isn't all that bad.
The good thing about this movie, is that it puts the really implausible stuff right at the beginning, and once it establishes the rules, it mostly sticks to them.
Two randos build a (sort of) time machine out of what looks like a Commodore 64 and a pile of literal junk (seriously, this movie gets a solid F for prop design). Rather than send people back in time, it has one and only one capability: it allows the users to kill a specific person in the past, as long as they can locate that person at a specific time, and of course this tees up a classic morality dilemma.
This changes the present and everyone in it, but because "yada yada yada quantum mechanics", anyone in the room with the machine will remember the original timeline - and NOT have any of the memories they should have in the new timeline. This is actually an issue for a lot of time travel movies, they generally just sweep under the rug rather than confronting it outright.
They start with a pretty clear case where killing a bad person in the past will save the life of a innocent person, but it won't be a spoiler to tell you that this has unintended consequences and that their attempts to set things right will just make things worse, or at least put them further and further from their original world.
So in the end, it's a mix of the butterfly effect, the multiverse, and the Trolley Problem. In spite of some of the other reviews, I found the acting and emotions pretty good. I think it would have made a good Twilight Zone or Black Mirror Episode, but stretching it to a full length movie got a little thin.
I didn't hate the ending, but a lot of people did.
Read full review
91%
TOMATOMETER
· 45 reviews
68%
AUDIENCE
· 100 ratings
5.6/10
2.8K
•••
hmmm surprisingly good