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#648 – Cyborg 2
Cyborg 2: Glass Shadow (1993)
Film review #648
Director: Michael Schroeder
SYNOPSIS: In the future, cyborgs are a part of everyday life. One cyborg production company takes to take out its competitor by sending a cyborg packed with an experimental explosive to their headquarters. When the cyborg’s instructor falls in love with her, the two escape, aided by a mysterious helper who shows up on screens to guide them to safety…
THOUGHTS/ANALYSIS: Cyborg 2 (Sometimes called Glass Shadow) is a 1993 sci-fi film and a sequel to the 1989 film Cyborg. Even though it is part of the Cyborg series, it has no relation to the original in terms of story or characters, apart from a brief flashback. Set in the year 2074, cyborgs (or androids, technically) are commonplace in all aspects of life, with cyborg production being dominated by two companies: Pinwheel Robotics in the USA, and Kobayashi Electronics in japan. Pinwheel have come up with a plan of corporate sabotage to put Kobayashi out of business by sending one of there cyborgs there as a spy and packed full of an experimental explosive that will be detonated and level the entire company. The chosen cyborg, Casella Reese, is trained by cyborg instructor Colton “Colt” Ricks, who has fallen for her, and when he learns the plot to send her to her death, escapes with her, leaving to them being hunted down as they flee. The setup of the film is fairly simple stuff, as the two end up on the run and pursued through the futuristic world. There’s nothing that stands out in this respect, as the film moves from setup to setup without much development between. There’s some okay visuals and effects with the cyborgs that just scream 1990’s sci-fi aesthetic, and clearly some thought and expertise has gone into making this work, but yes, it definitely looks of its time. The film is shovelled full of pointless action and nudity like you’d expect too, but maybe that’s what you’d expect from this sort as film as well.
Probably the most notable thing about the film is it being the film debut of Angelina Jolie as the female lead. Being only eighteen years old as well, she seems a bit out of place. It’s not a great film to debut in, but I suppose everyone has to start somewhere. The whole cast is a bit flat with no stand-out performances or characters. You’re not given much of an insight into Colt’s motivations (besides having the hots for the android), and the villains are a bit cartoonish. Everything is shot in very low lighting that probably obscures some of the cheapness, as well as most of what is going on. With all that said, the film is probably still better than Cyborg, because something actually happens, but Cyborg 2 does little to distinguish itself or make itself remotely interesting.
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#647 – Cyborg (1989)
Cyborg (1989)
Film review #647
Director: Albert Pyun
SYNOPSIS: In the near future, the world has become a post-apocalypse wasteland, and a ruthless gang is terrorising what is left of the United States. A female cyborg is sent to retrieve data from New York City and return it to Detroit in order to finish the development of a cure for a plague that is killing the survivors. She runs into a man who is fighting the leader of the gang, and asks him to escort her to Detroit…
THOUGHTS/ANALYSIS: Cyborg is a 1989 sci-film. Set in the typical post-apocalyptic wasteland of Mad Max ripoffs (and post-nuclear America too, I suppose), a plague is ravaging the survivors, and scientists in Detroit send a cyborg to New York City to get data that can help them complete a cure. While there, a gang tries to capture her so they can control the cure, and she seeks the help of Gibson Rickenbacker to escort her back to Detroit. The whole setup is very typical of this type of film, with the lone lead character who has abandoned his humanity rediscovering it as he is forced to accompany other people on a dangerous quest across the wasteland. There’s nothing that really sets the film apart from the oh so many similar films of the time. There’s some decent action that mostly revolves around Van Damme’s kickboxing expertise, but it’s all fairly par for the course.
In a film where one of the main characters is a cyborg, Van Damme still manages to come off as the last human character: his line delivery is barely audible, and clearly struggling with speaking English at some points. The villain is just your typical unhinged psychopath that doesn’t offer anything interesting, and everyone else is equally as dull. There’s some decent practical effects with the whole cyborg, but nothing too remarkable. The film really fails to embrace its best aspects: the fight scenes, and too much stunted dialogue upsets any sense of pacing. Probably not the worst of these types of movies, but Cyborg fails to really offer anything interesting, and doesn’t capitalise on the few things it does competently.
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#646 – Dark Tower (2017)
Dark Tower (2017)
Film review #646
Director: Nikolaj Arcel
SYNOPSIS: Jake Chambers is having dreams about another world in which a Gunslinger tries to stop the Man in Black form destroying a tower and thus the world. When some workers from a psychiatric ward come to take him, he recognises them wearing human skins like in his dreams, and manages to flee through a portal to the world in his dreams. There, he meets the Gunslinger, and the two of them attempt to bring down the man in Black before he can finish off both of their worlds…
THOUGHTS/ANALYSIS: Dark Tower is a 2017 film and an adaptation of Steven King’s series of novels of the same name. The story revolves around Jake Chambers, an ordinary schoolboy who has strange dreams about a ruined world and a gun-wielding man facing off against a Man in Black. When he discovers that the world is all too real, he teams up with the Gunslinger to save both his world and theirs. Emerging from a troubled production which saw the rights for the film passed between a number of studios and directors, the film takes the eight book series and condenses it into a just over ninety minute film. It should be evident that this comes fraught with problems. I have never read the books, but I am aware that the whole series is full of lore and worldbuilding, and the main issue with this film is that it has very little, and clumsily establishes what it has to before it rushes off onto the next plot point. I’m sure that there is an interesting world and mechanics in this story, but there’s no time taken to build or present it. The film throws the story into a typical three-act structure that again just skims over any worldbuilding and relies on the typical movie structure to carry the story through. First, we get Jake thrown into the Gunslinger’s world, then we get the Gunslinger thrown into Jake’s world with a typical fish-out-of-water experience in a very typical New York City setting, and then we get the finale. There’s no room for anything special or unique. Even if you want to make the argument that it isn’t trying to faithfully adapt the novels and just do its own thing with the material, it doesn’t do that either: it just slots it into this very formulaic structure.
The only thing real highlights of the film are Idris Elba’s performance as the Gunslinger, and some of the action scenes are quite nice. The rest of the characters don’t really offer anything interesting. Matthew McConaughey as the Man in Black with his ability to do just about anything is very flavourless. I a sense, I understand how this film became such a mess with it’s constant handing off to different people, meaning that any vision of it has been rewritten and dissected so nothing coherent remains. Even so, condensing such an obviously lore-heavy series into a film that barely stretches ninety minutes is evidently going to be fraught with problems without serious reworking: the solution the film finds to this is to shove it into a very typical structure that barely keeps it afloat in place of any worldbuilding. And it is the serious lack of worldbuilding that hampers this film: there’s no sense of place, setting, or consequence that makes anything matter. Dark Tower has some good moments, but barely coherent storytelling and worldbuilding leaves it a mess of a film.
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#645 – About Time (2013)
About Time (2013)
Film review #645
Director: Richard Curtis
SYNOPSIS: Tim learns from his Father that the men in his family have the ability to travel back in time. He uses this power to help improve his life, as his Father suggests, and upon meeting Mary, he does everything he can to make their relationship work…
THOUGHTS/ANALYSIS: About Time is a 2013 sci-fi romantic comedy film. After a lacklustre New Year’s Eve party, Tim Lake learns from his Father that the men in his family (himself included) have the ability to travel back in time. He decides to use this power to improve his life by finding love. When he encounters Mary by chance, he has to use his powers to make sure their relationship is perfect. The film focuses on using these powers within the range of the romance genre, and sidesteps a lot of the other issues that this power could address: Tim is clearly established from a well-off family that get along well, so has no real need to use his powers for money or the other typical things people would try to get if they had these powers. It pigeon-holes the film in only dealing with certain things, but it’s a romance film, so it should have a specific focus I suppose. When he meets Mary, he has to use his powers to make sure their relationship goes right, but when he inadvertently changes the past so they never meet, he has to go back in time to try and meet her by “chance,” which means he learns where she is going to be at certain times. now, I suppose you could argue that this is “okay” since they already did meet naturally and hit it off before Tim changed the past, so arranging himself to meet her by chance is just him repeating what he had done, but there’s still this feeling of him being manipulative about the whole situation that just irks me, and remained with me throughout the film. The film never once raises this dilemma that he changed the past so he should maybe just deal with it, and just carries on as if it’s not really an issue. The fact also that Mary never finds out about his powers really makes the relationship very one-sided.
The film is, despite the film’s title, about love, and hinges on the developing relationship between the two main characters. Both Tim and Mary have some compatibility, and there’s certainly some charm in their interactions. The film offers us a fairly well-rounded picture of the couple, from their first meeting, to marriage and children. The film doesn’t really offer a climax of any sort, it just levels out as Tim learns to make the most of life one day at a time. All of the issues and problems faced throughout the film don’t really feed into this climax, and are often easily fixed by the whole time travel business so they never happened, and no one really develops via their mistakes. As mentioned, Tim and Mary have a certain amount of chemistry, and they deviate enough from the typical romance leads, but their quirky personalities that ramble on in that quirky fashion is not going to endear them to everyone, and even if you appreciate the charm their base awkwardness brings, it does get old after two hours. We don’t really get a sense of any of the other characters either; we get a narration introducing them at the beginning, and that serves to sum up their whole character throughout the film, so again there’s very little development or anything new than what is immediately established.
The film takes a bit of a shift towards the end as Tim’s Dad passes away, and Tim begins to go back to the past to speak with him before he no longer can. It offers a touching finale to the film, but also it just doesn’t really fit in with the romance between Tim and Mary, as the latter is pretty much side-lined. I get that Tim’s dad first introduced him to the power, and is a secret between them, so it kind of closes the circle of the films story, but it would have been nice for it to at least play more of a part throughout the film so everything is weaved together a bit better. It is at this point as well that the film just throws its own rules about time travel out of the window, having Tim go back visiting his father before he died and such. The film hand-waives the issue of a butterfly effect of altering the past away in the beginning, and as mentioned Tim never really has to deal with the consequences of his actions. The romance film is director Richard Curtis’s bread and butter, but adding in the time travel element creates a lot of issues, as I always say: if you’re going top have time travel in your film, you need to know how it works, or it will quickly unravel the whole film with plot-holes and the like.
About Time has enough charm and chemistry to carry out its duties as a romance film, but suffers from side-stepping the problems that time travel inevitably creates, and ignores addressing consequences in fear of disrupting its attempt at creating the perfect romance through the redoing of very specific moments. There’s a bit too much of holding the film together on vibes alone rather than exploring its premise with any amount of depth. It’s Richard Curtis doing what he does best, but lack of any real plot or development of the characters leaves little substance underneath. It hits the right notes when it needs to, but it’s quite muddled when it needs to how it got there. maybe it’s charm can carry you through the film, or, like me, maybe it just flounders a few times too many.
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#644 – My Super Ex-Girlfriend (2006)
My Super Ex-Girlfriend (2006)
Film review #644
Director: Ivan Reitman
SYNOPSIS: Matthew Saunders starts dating Jenny Johnson, and learns that she is the superhero G-Girl. When he decides to break up with her, he must contend with the wrath of a superhero, while a supervillain schemes to take her powers…
THOUGHTS/ANALYSIS: My Super Ex-Girlfriend is a 2006 sci-fi comedy film. Matthew Saunders starts dated jenny Johnson, a woman he meets on the subway, and finds out that she is the superhero G-Girl. When he decides to break up with her, she decides to get revenge on him and make his life a living hell. The premise of the film is simple enough to grasp and offers the potential for some comedic moments. The trouble is that the film manages one or two of them and doesn’t take full advantage of it to take it anywhere interesting. It relies on crude humour that hasn’t really aged well, and also doesn’t really push any boundaries. One of the reasons for this is probably the PG-13 rating the film obviously wanted, and so anything that might have pushed said boundaries is obviously sidelined in the interest of playing it safe. Even so, there’s still plenty you could have done within the rating to make it more interesting, but due to a shoddy script devoid of imagination, and poor pacing, in which the ‘break up’ only happens half way through the film and leaves no time for anything substantial to happen before it has to set the stage for a resolution finale.
The one thing of note about the characters is that none of them are very likable: they’re all fairly flawed and annoying in some way. Uma Thurman is the stand out role and plays her part as the super-hero and nerdy neurotic alter-ego well, although a a lot of very cliché and unhinged traits are just dumped onto her character. Matthew as the male lead barely registers any interest, and Eddie Izzard as the villain is very half-baked. There’s also the distinct feeling that by the end of the film and everything is “resolved,” that no one has really learned anything. Overall, there’s certainly potential in the concept, but an obsession with a PG-13 rating and playing it safe leaves you thinking you could imagine much more interesting possibilities than what My Super Ex-Girlfriend actually gives you. Unlikeable characters, a fairly empty screenplay, and lack of many stand-out comedic moments leaves very little impression, despite Uma Thurman’s solid portrayal of the role she is given.
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#643 – Eva (2011)
Eva (2011)
Film review #643
Director: Kike Maíllo
SYNOPSIS: Alex returns to his hometown after ten years when he is commissioned to finish building a robotic child with emotions that he abandoned ten years earlier. He chooses to base this child on Eva, a young girl who is the daughter of his Brother and former girlfriend.
THOUGHTS/ANALYSIS: Eva is a 2011 sci-fi film. Set in 2043, Alex returns to his hometown as he is commissioned to finish a child-like robot with emotional intelligence, which he abandoned some ten years ago. Looking for a child to base the robot’s emotions on, he comes across Eva, who later turns out be the child of his Brother and former lover. The core of the story is a recognisable sci-fi one, a commentary on humanity, robots and the like. There’s nothing too special here that hasn’t been said by other films. It’s simple enough to follow, but that’s mostly because there’s not a lot going on. We’re introduced to a world where robots are commonplace, but we don’t really get a sense of how this has really effected or transformed society. The film is more focused on the individual characters though, so that’s excusable to a point.
Given that the film does centre around the characters, the biggest flaw in the film is that there’s little to no character establishment or development. Alex is essentially a mystery: we know he left for ten years after developing robots, but nothing else. We don’t know his stance on anything, what has been happening in his life, or anything of the sort. As such, it’s difficult to connect the events of the film to how it affects his character because there’s very little to affect. Lana, Eva’s Mother, is essentially that: she only exists as a Mother and love interest, and suffers severely from her personality being that she is a woman, which shouldn’t really be a thing in 2011. The performances are decent, but it often feels like they’re given very little to work with. The effects and CG models are fine for the time, but the main robot lacks the intricate lifelike movement and expression that would make them more significant. There just seems very little at stake throughout the whole film: it doesn’t really matter whether Alex creates this robot or not; nothing really depends on it, he’s just doing it because…? also, it turns out that [SPOILER] Eva is actually an android that can basically do everything he is trying to do anyway, being built by his Brother and Wife beforehand. The decision he takes to shut Eva down because she can apparently be dangerous just doesn’t seem justified either: she loses her temper, but it just doesn’t seem like it’s much different than a typical child, so essentially killing her for doing it is a very strange thing to end on. It’s nicely shot and produced, but there’s a void at the heart of the film that fails to generate anything substantive, or make an emotional point due to some very poor character development. Reviews for Eva generally aren’t too bad, but honestly I can’t agree: the good elements fall away due to a lack of cohesion in the screenplay and characters, and there’s many films that broach the same subject that do it better.
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#642 – Jiu Jitsu (2020)
Jiu Jitsu (2020)
Film review #642
Director: Dimitri Logothetis
SYNOPSIS: Jake Barnes awakens at a military outpost in Burma with no memory. He is broken out of the base by a group of jiu jitsu fighters who tell him that he is one of them, and they are tasked with defeating an alien invader that visits Earth every six years, and who will destroy it if they fail to defeat him…
THOUGHTS/ANALYSIS: Jiu Jitsu is a 2020 sci-fi film. A secret order of jiu jitsu fights must off an alien invader that visits every six years through a portal in a Burmese temple, and if they fail, the alien will destroy the world. That’s basically the whole plot, and is essentially Predator with some martial arts. However, it’s complicated by all sorts of nonsense that doesn’t provide any world-building or interesting lore, but just a heap of stuff that distracts and bloats out the runtime. Having Jake lose his memory makes no sense and clearly serves no reason other than to have the plot explained to him for the viewer’s purpose. The martial arts itself is fine, but it often feels so forced, in the sense that the situations people are in don’t seem to call for specific actions, and it just doesn’t flow right. Copious amounts of dialogue try to say things or put the pieces of the world together, but serve to ultimately just make things more bloated. So much in this film is unnecessary fluff that doesn’t go anywhere or develop into anything.
The characters are all one dimensional and uninteresting. Even the ones that are obviously trying to fill certain roles (comic relief etc.) fall flat. Nicholas Cage doing his typical crazy act doesn’t really work here either. For a martial arts movie, there’s a lot of stuff that actually gets in the way of the martial arts (none of it is actually jiu jitsu, by the way). The film sometimes opts for a comic book style transition between scene, which somewhat makes sense, but doesn’t commit to it for more than a third of the film. For some reason as well, there’s portions of fight scene near the beginning of the film that are shot from a first-person perspective, which makes no cinematic sense, and is completely at odds with the rest of the film: again, if you’re going to use one of these techniques, then at least commit to it. I honestly can’t fathom what the vision or direction is in this movie: it’s just stuff thrown in front of the camera, and any attempt to justify it somehow makes everything worse. It’s not even something you can just mindlessly enjoy either, it’s just too baffling and inconsistent to not pay attention to. It’s not that the cast is bad either; they’re just given nothing to do or to work with. I honestly can’t work out what this movie’s vision is or what it is trying to accomplish, and obviously no one else could either: the film was an absolute bomb at the box office. Jiu Jitsu is a poor attempt at martial arts and sci-fi where nothing hits home.
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#641 – Ad Astra (2019)
Ad Astra (2019)
Film review #641
Director: James Gray
SYNOPSIS: Following an energy surge originating from Neptune that disrupts electrical systems worldwide, Roy McBride is given a mission to travel to the planet, where a top secret project lost contact with earth many years ago, and headed by Roy’s Father. Believing Roy’s Father is still alive, he is tasked with sending a message to his father to try and re-establish contact, and begins a perilous journey across the Solar System to reach him…
THOUGHTS/ANALYSIS: Ad Astra is a 2019 sci-fi film. With a surge of energy causing global chaos, astronaut Roy McBride is assigned a top-secret mission to send a message to a secret project sent to Neptune, and led by Roy’s Father, who is believed to still be alive. Thus begins Roy’s (Brad Pitt) journey through a perilous solar system to reunite with his Father. Following in the vein of psychological sci-fi films such as Gravity, Moon and of course 2001: A Space Odyssey, we get a journey through outer space as well as the human condition. Where this film shows it’s strength is in its audio and visual design: the spatial structures and sets are detailed, special effects are nice, and you get a good sense of scale of the vast emptiness of space that compliments the emotional space within Roy that his Father left. The audio design is also pretty solid: noticeably, the film attempts, to some degree, to recreate the sound or lack thereof, in space: action scenes that take place in the vacuum are devoid of sound or very limited, which again reflects a sense of solitude and emptiness that the film is aiming at. Where the film falters is a spotty script that feels a bit chopped up as you move from one location to the next, distracting from the experience to constantly remind you that you’re in a film with scripted action scenes and dialogue that are paced out in a timely manner.
Brad Pitt pulls in a good performance as the lead Roy McBride: masterfully embodying the quiet undertakings of a man who has to not display emotion for his job, and also grappling at the emptiness within him. Pitt makes it look effortless, but not in a way that he doesn’t know what he’s doing. The rest of the cast play their parts well, but don’t really stand out, which again is important because the film centres around the protagonist’s relationships or lack thereof. One stand out is Donald Sutherland’s character who is leaned on distinctly in the first act, but doesn’t seem to serve the film in anyway, which makes his disappearance not have the effect it wants. The film’s payoff at the end throws a curveball, but it fails to really hit properly. What it gives us isn’t what we expect, but opens up new possibilities. the trouble is I don’t thin that is really what the film is about, and just giving us something completely different at the end doesn’t reflect on the journey in anyway.
While I praised the sound earlier for at least trying to simulate how sound might be heard in space, there are quite a lot of scientific liberties taken with zero gravity and whatnot. If the film wanted to be a psychological sci-fi epic, it should have really gone all in and put as much effort into the science as they did the audio and visuals. As it stands though, the story comes across as vague, and the need for awkward action scenes that forego the necessary scientific rigour leave it in a middling ground between epic and blockbuster, with only a few elements (again, the visuals and audio design) to stand on. Ad Astra is very much a style without substance film that fails to fully invest in what it wants to be. While it’s style is certainly noteworthy, it’s not enough for the whole film to revolve around.
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#640 – A Martian Christmas (2009)
A Martian Christmas (2009)
Film review #640
Director: José Alejandro García Muñoz
SYNOPSIS: When Martians discover a space rover from Earth, they assume it is a spying device, and identifying Santa Claus as the Earth’s leader, send a ship to Earth. Zip wants to spend time with his Father Zork, but since Zork has been chosen to fly the ship to earth, Zip stows away on the ship and accidentally jettisons himself in an escape pod. Alone on Earth’s surface, he must find his way back to his Father and discover the true meaning of Christmas along the way…
THOUGHTS/ANALYSIS: A Martian Christmas is a 2009 sci-fi Christmas film. It is somehow the fourth Christmas film about Mars and Martians, after Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (1964), The Christmas Martian (1971) and Christmas on Mars (2008). This time around, the Martians discover an Earth space rover which they believe to be a spying device used for a precursor to an invasion. Spying on Earth, they see humans being their miserable, aggressive selves, and determine Santa Claus to be their leader, who is going down people’s chimneys and stealing their things. The Martians decide that they need to strike first, and send a ship to Earth. This is a family Christmas film with all the typical themes thrown about that offer no surprises, even with the sci-fi twist. The first part of the film introduces us to the Martian society a little, but given that the runtime is under forty-five minutes, it takes far too long to really get into the Christmas section of the story. The intricacies of Martian society that the opening pours over don’t really establish that Christmas spirit enough, and being a film that’s aimed at children, I’m not sure it’s going to really maintain their attention.
The main thread of the story being a typical Father not spending enough time with his son doesn’t really inspire much Christmas spirit or uniqueness. It becomes more festive as the film moves to Earth, but again given the runtime, there’s not enough space to develop the new characters it introduces, or develop a coherent narrative. It gets in a few jokes, some mild peril and the like, but there ends up being too many characters scattered about doing different things to bring anything together. The character designs on the Martians are nice enough, but there’s an inconsistency between the characters, backgrounds and special effects that are a mish-mash of 2D animation and 3D CG that fails to give the film a memorable look. A Martian Christmas is not going to become a Christmas classic, due to having way too much going in in such a short runtime, and not producing anything memorable in terms of characters, humour, or Christmas spirit. It also had a very limited release on DVD, so even if it was good, nobody would have seen it to make it something families would return to year after year.
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#639 – Boss Level (2020)
Boss Level (2020)
Film review #639
Director: Joe Carnahan
SYNOPSIS: Retired special forces operative Roy Pulver is being forced to live the same day over and over, being chased and killed by a group of assassins that want him dead for some reason. He tries to work out the reason why all of this is happening and how to stop it, eventually learning it may have something to do with his ex…
THOUGHTS/ANALYSIS: Boss Level is a 2020 sci-fi film. Retired special forces operative Roy Pulver is living the same day over and over, until he is killed by one of the many assassins that want him dead. The Groundhog Day setup provides a familiar backdrop to this constant tour de force of action and violence. The plot itself barely tries to make sense; it’s just the backdrop to a wild ride as Roy tries to constantly make it further in the day than he has lived before, and untangle the mystery of why this is happening to him. The film is at its best when it can just let loose with some cartoony, over-the-top action sequences, keeping it fresh with every attempt Roy learning or trying something new. The film stutters a bit when it throws in all the drama with his ex, son and just the end of the damn world, and never really finds a proper place for them, but they’re overshadowed by the sheer entertainment of the action parts. There’s a theme running through the film – as the title suggests – of a video game motif of redoing levels and/or bosses each time you die in game, but this doesn’t really factor into the film bar a bit of aesthetic flair and a bit of bonding with Roy’s Son. It’s a an underdeveloped concept that perhaps feels like it got written out or downplayed during re-writes to make the film a bit smoother. This could have made the film a bit more unique and provided a more lasting impression, but as it stands, it’s not to memorable, but again, it’s still a fun ride while it lasts.
Bolstered by a surprisingly recognisable and established cast including Frank Grillo, Mel Gibson, and Naomi Watts, everyone turns in decent performances, although they could all have done with more development. I suppose this is hard though, when they are all unknowingly living the same day over and over, so can’t really evolve over the course of the film. The assassins sent after Roy are a cartoon-ish cast of villains that are fun to watch and provide their own flair. It’s definitely fun to watch Roy learn to overcome the obstacles in front of him and unravel the conspiracy in front of him, and the film is brought to life with some cool stunts, although the special effects are sometimes a bit off. Where the film takes a sharp dive: it’s one of those films that just…ends abruptly. I get that the film takes place in one loop, and leaving the future outside it ready to be written, but the way it is done here leaves very little ending or resolution: we just get a bit of explanation, and then it just stops. I don’t want to focus on the negatives too much, because they are vastly overshadowed by how fun the film is, and the ride it takes you on is more than enough to make it a good watch. More could have been done with it for sure, but what we get is surprisingly fresh, undoubtedly exciting, and plenty of fun.
