Today is March 373rd 2020, and I marked it by watching a time-loop movie. This one is the teen sex ‘comedy’ Premature. Imagine American Pie mixed with Groundhog Day, but without either film’s charm. Its greatest achievement was provoking a review from the Onion’s AV Club which began:
When you handle shit with gloves, the saying goes, the gloves get shittier, but the shit doesn’t get any glovier. By the same token, if you take the plot of one of the greatest Hollywood comedies of the past quarter-century and cram it full of crass teen humor, it’s not as if the former somehow magically elevates the latter.
It’s even worse than that review makes it sound. To quote another review:
The filmmakers seem not to understand the difference between a social error and sexual assault, which is deeply depressing. In the interests of saving time and spleen, this review shall end here.
Statistics
- Length of first iteration: 22 minutes
- Length of second iteration: 8 minutes
- Reset point: the main character’s orgasm
- Fidelity of loop: perfect
- Exit from the loop: going to bed with the right character
There is so much wrong with this film, including racism, transphobia and misogyny. The worst part of it is, the actors all do a pretty good job (apart from, you know, signing on to do it in the first place). People have gone to a lot of effort to make something very bad. It’s so bad that I’m amazed it’s not better.
There was a single laugh-out-loud funny joke involving a car accident. And there was a good moment where the main character became confused about what he’d done on that particular iteration. But, god, everyone involved in this ought to be embarrassed.
At the end of the story, the main character gets together with ‘the right person’ and escapes the loop; but that character deserves something more than being the prize at the end of such a sordid movie. More than most examples, this film draws attention to the problem with time-loop movies: that the loop is so arbitrary, and meaningless beyond its existence within a movie.
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