A cool little Brittish film starring Melissa George and Liam Hemsworth (whose older brother Chros is going to play Thor!). So cool, in fact, that I'll put part of the review in inviso-text (you have to highlight the area to see the text) so as not to give anything away unless you really want to know. The story starts out normal enough with a group of people setting out on a fun sailing trip. But then they are caught in a strange storm. The boat capsizes and they drift to find a large, seemingly abandoned ocean liner. They climb on board, but now more strange things begin to occur, and then they are attacked and realize they are not alone on the ship.
invisotext:
What Melissa Goerge's character realizes they are caught in a time loop. Why/how is never explained (apparently all movies are doing the Cloverfield/no explaination thing!) but we can guess it has something to do with the storm they were caught in. The thing is that each time the loop repeats, it means another copy of themselves are coming to ship. So there are multiple copies of each character coming to the ship again and again in an endless loop. Eventually she decides the only way to break the loop is to kill the other people to break the cycle. She's willing to do this because she is desperate to get back to her son. Eventually she is able to do this, but the strange things continue and we realize she is still caught in a loop more tragic then we imagined before.
A final warning -- the first time I watched the movie around midpoint I was lost (yes, I was doing other stuff ont he computer as I watched, but still...) so I had to watch it again, and then one more time. The movie does pay itself off very well. These kinds of movies are hard to do and I think this movie did it well. There are still a lot of problems that prevent it from being great. Namely, while the movie does a great job with it's elaborate, twisting plot, there really isn't anything underneath a lot of cool plot. Similar movies (Groundhog's Day, Back in Time) use the plot to say something about the characters. I didn't get that from this movie. The lack of emotion undercuts what otherwise is a very cool movie. Still for fans of puzzle movies (like Primer) it's worth watching.
--Paul
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