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Coherence
Psychological Thriller / English / 2013
WHY'D I WATCH IT?
Another ChatGPT recommendation.
WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
Reading the synopsis on this movie, I was expecting a pretty predictable plot, maybe something in the vein of Phenomenon, but I was mistaken.
This is one of those movies that tries to tackle some really ambitious concept like multiverse theory, but explains it very poorly and ultimately undermines it's own excitement.
The premise is that there's a house party, a comet flies overhead knocking out the lights, and in an effort to contact a nearby house whose lights are on, it's quickly discovered that the mysterious second house is a mirror of their own, and not long after that it's determined that every house in the neighborhood is a pocket dimension containing a house party of guests slightly different than we're familiar with.
The rationalization here is quantum mechanics, and Schroedinger's Cat is used as an example, but, whether intentional or not, it's immediately misunderstood.
The Schroedinger's Cat example supposes that until it enters into observable reality, the cat in the box may be simultaneously alive or dead at the same time. I don't pretend to understand quantum mechanics myself, I didn't understand Primer, but it at least seems obvious to me that the example doesn't suggest that anyone caught in a "pending multiverse", or whatever you want to call it, isn't necessarily at risk of dying.
A similar example could be made of a coin flipped in a closed container, you don't know whether it's heads or tails until you open it. Schroedinger's Cat is just a macabre example of the same concept, but at least one of the characters in this movie immediately becomes a ticking timebomb when he interprets it to mean that only one or the other version of him will live.
It becomes a core conflict of the movie; speculating over whether they should go and steal a book on quantum mechanics from the other house under the assumption that depriving them of that information may prevent their alternate version of this character from coming over and killing them... then further speculating about going over there and killing them first... when nothing of the sort need be assumed at all, and in fact if the "neutral" version of this character were less presumptive, then the odds are relatively greater than his alternate versions would also be less presumptive.
So really, it's a self-fulfilling conflict, which is really stupid.
It's also really stupid when there are not one but two infidelity subplots, just to inject some additional artificial conflict into the equation.
I honestly burst out laughing when they dropped this line:
What a dumb line, it makes a little bit more sense if it is in fact true that reality branched at the time of the comet, but that's not certain and it also undermines the other infidelity subplot because those characters also have a relationship prior to the comet.
The main point of contention here is that there is one scene where Girl #4A snogs Guy #1A, and Girl #3A witnesses it and informs Girl #1A whose married(?) to Guy #1A so Girl #1A gets upset and confronts Guy #1A, but discovers that Guy #1B is not in fact Guy #1A because Guy #1B did not snog Girl #4A, you get it?
Girl #4A I guess gets jaded as the party starts getting violent and Guy #3A gets attacked by Guy #3J, which is honestly his fault in the first place, so Girl #4A bails and visits various houses until she finds a peaceful one and isolates Girl #1Z, attacks and replaces her. Which works until the comet passes and evidence of what she did still exists and it's implied that Girl #1Z still exists.
It's pretty underwhelming because she really doesn't go through any sort of character arc, it's really just "That one psycho bitch who potentially drugged all of us told me you kissed your ex so now I'm going to go kill an alternate reality version of myself and life with an alternate reality version of you instead."
The coolest part about this whole movie is the idea that when people go outside, they enter a "roulette" that puts them at an alternate reality version of their house party and by the end of the movie, almost everyone is discovered to be from an alternate reality house party, so there's a whole "imposter" game that could have been played with in this movie, but barely gets any sort of mileage at all.
A couple characters discover that they're not originally from the house they're in and just bail after quite a bit of screentime, and yet despite setting up all these plans to try and undermine or social engineer the other versions of themselves they just don't do it, even though trying to figure out who among the cast are actually real would be SUPER ****ING COOL.
There's just no whodunnit element, no The Thing element, it's just dropped on us at the end that everybody was mixed up about where they were and came from at the end. Really wasted potential.
The infidelity subplots were bad, the explanation of multiverse theory was bad, the ending was predictable, everyone was too quick to explain what was going on, I wish the dumb drug-dealing astrology bitch got hit by a car, and what even were the value of these characters at the end?
The first 15 minutes of this movie are just these talking heads and you establish maybe one or two points of interest that come up later in the movie, what did I need all that for?
I didn't care about any of these characters except maybe Hugo Armstrong, because his voice makes me feel warm and fuzzy, but he also vaguely reminds me of Vaush and I now see his Twitter account is one of these turbo-cringe Hollywood partisan accounts.
A lot of potential wasted on this one.
Final Verdict: [Meh...]
Coherence
Psychological Thriller / English / 2013
WHY'D I WATCH IT?
Another ChatGPT recommendation.
WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
Reading the synopsis on this movie, I was expecting a pretty predictable plot, maybe something in the vein of Phenomenon, but I was mistaken.
This is one of those movies that tries to tackle some really ambitious concept like multiverse theory, but explains it very poorly and ultimately undermines it's own excitement.
The premise is that there's a house party, a comet flies overhead knocking out the lights, and in an effort to contact a nearby house whose lights are on, it's quickly discovered that the mysterious second house is a mirror of their own, and not long after that it's determined that every house in the neighborhood is a pocket dimension containing a house party of guests slightly different than we're familiar with.
The rationalization here is quantum mechanics, and Schroedinger's Cat is used as an example, but, whether intentional or not, it's immediately misunderstood.
The Schroedinger's Cat example supposes that until it enters into observable reality, the cat in the box may be simultaneously alive or dead at the same time. I don't pretend to understand quantum mechanics myself, I didn't understand Primer, but it at least seems obvious to me that the example doesn't suggest that anyone caught in a "pending multiverse", or whatever you want to call it, isn't necessarily at risk of dying.
A similar example could be made of a coin flipped in a closed container, you don't know whether it's heads or tails until you open it. Schroedinger's Cat is just a macabre example of the same concept, but at least one of the characters in this movie immediately becomes a ticking timebomb when he interprets it to mean that only one or the other version of him will live.
It becomes a core conflict of the movie; speculating over whether they should go and steal a book on quantum mechanics from the other house under the assumption that depriving them of that information may prevent their alternate version of this character from coming over and killing them... then further speculating about going over there and killing them first... when nothing of the sort need be assumed at all, and in fact if the "neutral" version of this character were less presumptive, then the odds are relatively greater than his alternate versions would also be less presumptive.
So really, it's a self-fulfilling conflict, which is really stupid.
It's also really stupid when there are not one but two infidelity subplots, just to inject some additional artificial conflict into the equation.
I honestly burst out laughing when they dropped this line:
"Do you not understand what I'm saying? This all started tonight, and if there are a million different realities, I have slept with your wife in every one of 'em."
The main point of contention here is that there is one scene where Girl #4A snogs Guy #1A, and Girl #3A witnesses it and informs Girl #1A whose married(?) to Guy #1A so Girl #1A gets upset and confronts Guy #1A, but discovers that Guy #1B is not in fact Guy #1A because Guy #1B did not snog Girl #4A, you get it?
Girl #4A I guess gets jaded as the party starts getting violent and Guy #3A gets attacked by Guy #3J, which is honestly his fault in the first place, so Girl #4A bails and visits various houses until she finds a peaceful one and isolates Girl #1Z, attacks and replaces her. Which works until the comet passes and evidence of what she did still exists and it's implied that Girl #1Z still exists.
It's pretty underwhelming because she really doesn't go through any sort of character arc, it's really just "That one psycho bitch who potentially drugged all of us told me you kissed your ex so now I'm going to go kill an alternate reality version of myself and life with an alternate reality version of you instead."
The coolest part about this whole movie is the idea that when people go outside, they enter a "roulette" that puts them at an alternate reality version of their house party and by the end of the movie, almost everyone is discovered to be from an alternate reality house party, so there's a whole "imposter" game that could have been played with in this movie, but barely gets any sort of mileage at all.
A couple characters discover that they're not originally from the house they're in and just bail after quite a bit of screentime, and yet despite setting up all these plans to try and undermine or social engineer the other versions of themselves they just don't do it, even though trying to figure out who among the cast are actually real would be SUPER ****ING COOL.
There's just no whodunnit element, no The Thing element, it's just dropped on us at the end that everybody was mixed up about where they were and came from at the end. Really wasted potential.
The infidelity subplots were bad, the explanation of multiverse theory was bad, the ending was predictable, everyone was too quick to explain what was going on, I wish the dumb drug-dealing astrology bitch got hit by a car, and what even were the value of these characters at the end?
The first 15 minutes of this movie are just these talking heads and you establish maybe one or two points of interest that come up later in the movie, what did I need all that for?
I didn't care about any of these characters except maybe Hugo Armstrong, because his voice makes me feel warm and fuzzy, but he also vaguely reminds me of Vaush and I now see his Twitter account is one of these turbo-cringe Hollywood partisan accounts.
A lot of potential wasted on this one.
Final Verdict: [Meh...]