Embers

This is a movie that will grab your attention. You will develop interest in the characters and the story that they are in. However, the movie doesn't take you anywhere and that seems to be the glaring problem. All movies need an arc. Stories are suppose to have some sort of end. While the beginning and even middle of this story draw you in and end falls flat. While the acting in the movie is above average and while production value is very good the obvious whole is too much to look past. What we are left with is the script that simply has no idea where it is going. This is why this movie is rated as 6/10 on the site.

We get an interest in these characters and their story but it doesn't actually have any interesting story to tell you about them. The whole movie is simply a waiting for the climax that never comes. As if they pieced together scenes to generate interest but then take it nowhere.

I love the concept, the acting, the production. But this is a script that needed a lot of work before being shot. As the story needs to be more than simply the effects of the disease. We are expecting more from these characters story lines. Stories about nothing tend to be nothing anyone wants to watch. The last thing a movie should do is leave the audience wanting in a bad way at the end. I give it a 7/10 which is more than most rated it. Because there is a fair bit of quality work here. It's not that the movie isn't interesting. It is. It just lets you down after such a good start.

A film about memory that will trigger future memories for me of its many haunting moments and images. An incredibly ambitious accomplishment of genuine independent filmmaking (both in theme, design, and execution). The always delightful Jason Ritter (here in a heartbreaking role; a simple beat he takes with a water bottle is among the most poignant scenes in recent cinema), and some thoroughly confident and brilliant actors new-to-me whom I hope to see again (Iva Gocheva, Roberto Cots, Greta Fernandez) made this well worth the viewing, along with the surprise of discovering a director (Claire Carre) who will surely deliver many fascinating films in the future.

I saw some favorable comments about this, and it was sci-fi which sometimes opens up interesting possibilities, so I really wanted to like this movie. Unfortunately I did not see this going anywhere. It was very predictable, shallow and clichéd, even naive. Toward the end I was hoping to see some kind of point to justify the favorable reviews - instead the movie just ended. Technically it was OK. The actors were OK. And yes, it was not that generic Hollywood garbage, as mentioned in another review. Yet, the ideas of this movie have already been seen and used so much better in many other movies. If you have not seen those other movies yet, good for you, you are in for a treat! Unfortunately for me, I have seen those other movies.

People probably expected something very sciency, with special effects, with the big contagion that gets solved by the brilliant scientist, but it is nothing like that. It just describes, in a pretty slow pace, the aftermath of a global contagion that makes everybody amnesic. People that love each other forget the other exists at random moments, smart intellectuals fight all day to remember who they were by reading their own books (man, that should be another movie altogether!), rich people have built bunkers in which they educate their children who, unfortunately, reach adolescence and become stupid, and so on. There is no storyline, no explanation, no closure. Nothing too brutal, nothing too bloody, just people being people without being themselves.

It is not a great movie, it will not be remembered throughout the ages as a classic of direction or acting or storytelling, but it's not bad either. It's a "what if?" scenario played close to the end and well interpreted.

3/31/18. This was a visual meditation about the importance of memory. When you lose your memory you lose your humanity. There is very little in terms of story lines, just little vignettes of people trying to make it through the day with little memory of who they are and what just happened to them. Very sad. Just think of all these people having Alzheimers and you will understand just how tragic it is to lose one's ability to remember memory. In some ways it's better to have bad memories than to have no memories at all.