This movie begins as a standard teen "party at the rich kid's house at the end of senior year and this is the nerds' last chance to fit in and become popular magically" movie. Then a meteor crashes down, which obviously (as we all know from
SCIENCE) makes time skip into weird little loops. Basically, time moves on as normal, but every few minutes, the people nearby are duplicated with versions of themselves from a few minutes ago, who go on living out those few minutes until they disappear again. So the regular-timeline people have to deal with these copies for the time that the copies are around. Yeah, that's pretty weird. Luckily for 90% of the characters in the movie, they happened to be in a different place a few minutes ago, so they don't even see their duplicates until near the end. Only our heroes, the nerds of course, are in on the weirdness from the beginning.
The horror comes in in that each time, the duplicates are from sooner back in time, so the characters know that eventually they'll 'catch up' with the present. Which leaves them wondering what happens when they do. Their solution to this potential catastrophe is to try to murder their duplicates so that they get to be the only survivors. This is quite an overreaction. Clone Wars ensue.
This movie does not click for me. It's so weird how the people react with such violence and horror at seeing copies of themselves. I mean, I'd freak out, it's certainly not normal, but my instincts wouldn't jump right to grabbing a knife. And did nobody worry that killing the copy, which they realized was themselves from an earlier time, might result in their own death? I mean that's some high stakes to completely ignore! But for the record, no, nobody once suggests that. Strangely, the instant somebody brings up the idea that the timelines are going to merge eventually, everybody just goes nuts and gets ready to start bashing heads.
That does make for an interesting change of pace - the regular timeline people turn out to be the badguys here, lashing out at the clones before the clones have any idea that anything is wrong. But like I said, it just doesn't ring true that people would be this violent in the face of confusion.
So, there are moments in the middle of this movie that feel like Donnie Darko, and make it feel like there's some big mystery that's going to come together (spoiler: there's not). But for the most part it's just a bit silly and teeny-bopper. And makes almost no sense. The "hero" of the story is a guy who murders his girlfriend because he likes her clone better after Groundhog-Daying her into un-dumping him (and once again, how is he so sure that you can kill one to make the other be the 'right' one? No concern at all that you're just plain killing them?).
In the end, we have a body count of somewhere around 10 (there's a very confusing twin battle at the end), and the movie earns
1 out of 5 People in one timeline, and
2 out of 5 People in another, for an average of 1.5. Not really a movie I'd recommend, but it's certainly original. It felt like it might become something good by about halfway through, but then everybody just went nuts and it was a slasher movie starring everybody as Jason.
Today's picture is a very bad cartoon about how odd the people in this movie acted. And yes, I know the guys on the bottom are strange stretchy-armed mutants, with no shading or background. I'm terrible at drawing people to begin with, but especially after I spent an hour on the top, I was just ready to be done! I need to speed up and just do quick sketches. Please keep in mind I am not doing any penciling or practice, so hopefully I'm learning stuff as I go. Maybe day 31 will rock!
