Aporia

I'll save you the time: it has no resolution. I hate non-endings, open endings or whatever it is called when writers/directors can't commit to an ending. Don't know what to write as an ending? Let's make it super cool and make the audience figure it out!!! Argh. I am very much annoyed by these "endings", so I wanted to warn you so that you can skip it or at least have realistic expectations.

Imagine the ending of "The Good Son" where you don't know which kid the mom decides to drop at the cliff scene. That they just cut to her pondering her choices (unknown to you) at the end. Lame, right? Anti-climatic.

Pros: I really enjoyed seeing Judy Greer as the main character because I love her acting, but other than that, meh.

I love time-travel stories and I'll suspend belief in whatever you tell me the workings of the machine/ mind time travel entail. I did like the premise of it and found it interesting but with no ending, all the build up comes to nothing :(

I have the impression that this film wouldn't have the same charm if it wasn't super indie like it is. The story is about someone who invents a time machine and I imagine if there was money, this prop would be terribly sophisticated, the soundtrack would be present from beginning to end (something that really irritates me in Hollywood cinema) and there would be an all-star cast.

So, we have a well-known actress and others a little less so, but they don't do a bad job. I watched the film from beginning to end without getting bored at all, the story is well told and there are moments of tension and mystery. I would like to not reveal anything that would spoil the experience for those who haven't seen the film yet, but I repeat that it's not bad at all and I don't think anyone will regret watching it. It's a relief to watch a film that doesn't need the usual Hollywood gimmicks.

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.

IN A NUTSHELL: Since losing her husband, Sophie has struggled to manage grief, a full-time job, and parenting her devastated daughter, but when a former physicist reveals a secret time-bending machine, Sophie will be faced with an impossible choice for a chance at happiness again.

The film was directed and written by Jared Moshe. Well done, Jared! Already, the film has been nominated for "Best Film" at the Fantasia Film Festival.

It's helpful to know that the word "aporia" means an irresolvable, internal contradiction or logical disjunction in an argument or theory (Oxford Dictionary). It's the perfect title for this film.

THINGS I LIKED: I've been a fan of Judy Greer for decades. She always gets roles as the best friend or some supporting character, so I'm happy to see her as the lead in this movie. She absolutely crushes it.

All of the cast members did a great job and include Edi Gathegi, Peyman Moaadi, and Faithe Herman.

Like a lot of films these days, this one tackles the human perspective of the multiverse. I love time travel movies and loops.

I love twists, and this movie forces you to think deeply about choices and consequences.

Most movies lately tell audiences to just do whatever makes YOU happy, with no regard for responsibility or consequences. I really like that this film explores those ideas deeper.

The color palette looked muted, which I thought was a great choice because the story takes a look at reality and alternate realities. The choices weren't always clear either.

THINGS I DIDN'T LIKE: The mechanical contraption that the former physicists built looks ridiculous.

The film completely glosses over the daughter's reaction to how her father is now alive. How is it determined who will have memories and who will not? There are some plot holes like that, so try not to overthink the story too much.

The film moves quite slowly.

I didn't feel a lot of chemistry between the leading couple.

There was a rumor that this film is related to the Cloverfield franchise, but it's not.

TIPS FOR PARENTS: Young kids will be very bored.

Profanity and F-bombs Talk of a drunk driver who killed a man Some alcohol and cigarettes People talk about killing other people.

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.