ARQ (2016)

ARQ (2016)

4/10

Starring

Robbie Amell

Rachael Taylor

Shaun Benson

Gray Powell

Directed by Tony Elliot

The movie is half-baked and a very exhausting Groundhog Day kind of scenario. The challenge is the first act, it is dull and very un-eventful and then imagine that happening over and over again.

I for one believe the movie would have mattered as interesting and worth seeing if they got the intro right. The first act did not last long enough to deliver a sizable punch of intrigue and thrill, instead we get a straight forward things happening in a chaos theory kind of way.

Then we witness the repercussions of the little change play out similarly with to the first, with our supposed protagonist trying to get ahead of time.

The movie is set in the future where the human race is suffering from lack of food and good atmosphere. Humans now live isolated and struggle to keep food rations to themselves away from robbers. A man named Renton wakes up besides his former lover Hannah. The next thing we see are three men breaking into his bedroom and capturing them and tie them to a chair.

They demand he tells them where his rations are, but when something led to his death, he finds himself waking up again to experience the same thing over again.

When he gets killed, wakes up again on the same day. He soon figures out why they are caught in a time loop. Where he has to relive a home invasion on repeat go wrong. Now he is working against time to break the loop and escape the consequences of his life actions.

The disappointment in this movie is that it stated its own problem, “you cannot expect a different outcome by repeating the same action(s) over and over again.” The writers seem to forget that seeing a repeated dumbness of an actor can be boring and exhausting. The protagonist, instead of learning he just at certain times repeated the same action(s) over and over again.

You see him tweak some things, but the writers wrote him to be very naïve and extremely dumb to think that such tweaks were going to have a needed effect. How the director thought this was going to be fun to watch goes beyond me.

Imagine you have figured out the intent of the people around you and what they are capable of, like twice over. Then you go ahead and trust them to make the critical choice to change the outcome, when they have already failed on other critical decisions.

By the time the movie gets to the deep part and hidden secrets, you are already exhausted.

Here is a sci-fi movie about the future, that just failed to entertain, you can help yourself by missing this on Netflix.