Coma

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
Yet another IMDb result, this one is about a world only accessible by coma patients.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
Weirdly, both this movie and Durak feature Russian protagonists with a background in building construction.

Though this movie did not exactly knock it out of the park, I think I can comfortably say that it is the most enjoyable Russian movie I've seen so far. At least it has by far the most potential as a new IP.

In this world, coma patients find themselves as amnesiacs in a shared mind space consisting of their past memories. This clash of different ideas creates a massive sprawling chaos-scape which honestly looks really cool. It's 100% the sort of movie that NEEDS CG, or at least some incredible matte painting, but also risks going overboard with it.

Fortunately, the CG doesn't come off as too gratuitous save at least one scene where the main character creates a small structure with his mind, another character reaches out to touch it, and it's clearly not a real prop. You couldn't hire like one guy to make a shitty white plaster prop for that shot? Come on.

I'm also not a fan of the "Reapers" which are the roving threats that exist in this world. They walk around like they're on three stilts and the constant liquid trailing effect they have looks tacky and cheap. There's exactly one scene in which the Reapers are explained and I still don't know what the hell they are. One character gets cut by one and turns into a Reaper by the end of the movie, yet somehow that simple concept was not communicated in the one scene whose job it was to communicate it.

Also, the characters are fully aware that this guy was injured, why are they not going full zombie panic mode and debating on whether to euthanize him?


Anyway the setting aside, the premise is Main Guy wakes up in the world of "Coma", and he meets up with a group of other coma patients who each have developed unique powers in this new world. Main Guy, being a former architect basically gets the power of pure creation, which I think is a shitty power because it's totally uninteresting.

Not to make constant references to byronic heroes, but think of Lelouch from Code Geass. He had the power to command somebody to do one thing once, and only once, and he had to secure line-of-sight to do it. There's SO MUCH you can accomplish with that power, but it's also incredibly restrictive. This is what provokes creative thinking and strategy and all the shit that makes these stories great.

But Main Guy in Coma can just build whatever he wants. That's pretty underwhelming. Everyone else gets niche utility powers too.

Anyway the group is lead by some dude who has "awoken" from Coma before, which is certainly a questionable statement we don't explore, and says he intends to find an "island" isolated from the Reapers for people to live on.

There are other characters, one is set up as a butthurt antagonist and another has a BRUTAL Overnight Romance with Main Guy. This is rationalized later by them actually having a relationship prior to the incident that put them both in comas, but it's still incredibly dumb in the moment. Main Guy is also unreasonably flippant about the dead woman in his dream car and this is only so the movie can have a reveal later that it is in fact this girl he instantly romanced.

Blahblahblah, Main Guy wakes up and, as it's been teased throughout the movie up to now, he was actually in an artificial coma as a result of the group leader who is actually "The Teacher", a cult leader using religion as a veil to collect guinea pigs to test out his new technology which allows people to voluntarily enter the coma world, and he wants Main Guy to build his island.

After this it ends exactly as you'd expect it too, the Reapers are only reincorporated so Butthurt Guy can be redeemed for killing Teacher in the end.

The whole movie basically meets the absolute minimum threshold of what qualifies for a passable sci-fi fantasy movie.

That said, I think the premise is FANTASTIC. The concept of a real world kool-aid drinking cult luring people into this coma hivemind universe where entirely separate lives are lived out is pretty cool. I can totally imagine a D&D campaign or something where it's revealed the characters are all secretly victims of the cult in the real world, and they're just playing out this little fantasy adventure in their head. That's just brilliant material and there's so much room to expand on this concept, like there could be different iterations of this world in different chapters of the cult around the globe and stuff...

I really just want to see someone else take this concept and go further with it. For now though, it's an adequately engaging movie.


Final Verdict:

[Good]