This film is an abomination. What should’ve been an entertaining popcorn flick is instead a generic action film with no ounce of effort into making its screenplay believable. Yes, time-travel in media is often very easily breakable or contradicts the laws of physics when you dive into the rules the story presents, but this movie within 5 minutes will already have you questioning the dumb premise they’ve set up. The film then proceeds to have around 30 minutes of exposition surrounding said premise, where they try justify to the audience that what they’re doing is a good idea. And how do they do this? By having the most boring dialogue and getting characters in the world asking copious amounts of questions to the people from the future that we get the most thinnest, flimsy answers to.
The film doesn’t get much better from here in terms of it making sense, with a lot the things happening in the film happening for the connivence of plot. For example, when the people from the past are drafted into the future they are dropped from a huge height with no parachutes, many of these people then die on landing, however, upon returning to the present they’re dropped from a smaller height. There’s numerous examples of this throughout where plot elements are created purely to increase the stakes and service the story when needed that it just ends up making the film seem dumb and contradictory.
Let’s talk about the characters though shall we. First off Dan, played by Chris Pratt, honestly Dan was a brick wall most of the time. I don’t know if it was in the direction, or the writing, or Pratt himself but he was completely emotionless for most of the runtime, despite being thrown into the most intense situations or under a lot of emotional pain throughout with his daughter, he simply didn’t emote to what was going on. This paired with the unbelievable amount of plot armour he had just made him a thoroughly uninteresting character to watch. Pratt’s daughter played by Yvonne Strahovski delivered the best performance in the film, one that had some emotion to it and managed to elevate the lines she was given. Oh and let’s not forget about the rest of the amazing characters… oh wait never mind they’re all either incredibly boring side characters that are so dull or ‘quirky’ characters that get one funny line. And there’s J.K Simmons who tries his best to make his character interesting.
It’s not all bad though, the third act, for how dumb the film was prior, was kinda fun and I will say the creature design on the Whitespikes was really cool and graphically looked great throughout. However for this being a $200 million movie it’s unacceptable to have some basic VFX look as if it’s the default package used in After Effects. It’s unfortunate cause while there’s some decent visuals throughout, they’re paired with some super jarring effects that brings the whole atheistic of the movie down.
The biggest offence here is the script though. Not only is the initial premise so dumb but there’s a copious amount of character moments that are unsatisfying, completely stupid and some that highlight how dumb the premise of the movie is. But worst of all there’s actual errors in the script. There’s lines that are delivered in this film where wrong words are used that are clearly meant to be something else, for a movie of this budget surely someone would’ve read over the script and seen the errors, or they would’ve been caught on set. It’s just lazy and super unprofessional to have errors left in a film.
★
