Today is March 374th 2020, and I marked it by watching two time-loop movies. The second was the sequel to Happy Death Day. This was OK, a bit too noisy, and not really interested in being a time-loop film. The first half hour was fun though, with the story swerving all over the place. But maybe it would have been better (and more fitting?) to just watch Happy Death Day again? Spoilers follow.
This film played with the time loop concept, seeing what could be done with it. So we got a scene I’ve not seen before, where one character explains the time loop to another person who is also experiencing it. We got a reference to Sisyphus, just like in Before I Fall. We also had a suicide-reset sequence played as a joke which actually managed to make me laugh.
In this film, we learn that the looping was caused by a machine, which brought the film close to being disqualified (one of the rules I have is that the looper cannot use a machine to enter the loop by choice). This also meant that Tree discovered that the time loop was not because she was special, and was not there to make her a better person. It was interesting to see her grapple with this.
It felt like the last section of the film was using a lot of action and shouting to try to keep the energy going and I found myself flagging. I was also a little bemused that Tree, having found herself in an alternate world where her mother was alive, decided to return to her original universe to be with a guy who’d known her for 24 hours. It wasn’t the most convincing plotting.
Statistics
- Length of first iteration: 7 minutes
- Reset point: death
- Fidelity of loop: variable (and the film almost got disqualified)
- Exit from the loop: macguffin resets the universe
I’m not even close to finished yet. But I have a couple of interesting looking films coming next.