Reviews

The only reason I can think of for all the bad reviews and horrid IMDb rating, is that people went into the film expecting originality, but instead got a cliché movie, but a cliché is only a cliché if it's not used as a cliché.

Many times reviewers will condescend harsh critics by saying they didn't understand the movie, and therefor that's the reason they must not have liked it. Don't know about you but I hate to be the recipient of said condescension. However in this case, I think I need to be a hypocrite because I genuinely think many missed the point.

This movie was actually brilliant in its own right. Every cliché, every predictable outcome, every ridiculous encounter was all intentionally scripted to be as such, and for that reason it actually made it not just bearable but entertaining to watch. Hailee Steinfeld's character (Megan) is the walking encyclopedia of teen pop culture and she wants to experience every second of it. As expected that experience comes with hard aches and coming of age realities. The fact that each character makes it blatantly obvious of their cliché role in this cliché movie, is somehow anti-cliché, and therefore an extremely fun and well acted family feel-good movie. It's not going to be for everyone, but if you can appreciate a fun perspective on the teen culture genre, you'll enjoy this for what it is. It's not an 8 out of 10 movie, but in its own way and in its respective corner of entertainment, an 8 is well deserved.

It's the cliché that isn't a cliché.

This is going to be somewhat of a difficult review as my rating is based on hypotheticals... let me explain that:

This movie is very familiar in the sense that the "groundhog day" concept has been beaten to death, then you wake up and it's beaten to death, then you wake, etc... however I felt ARQ did an amazing job of realizing this, and ushered us into the story line of continuous time-loops relatively fast and efficient, while still keeping me intrigued to the background story taking place. There is a lot of information and history left to the imagination which will definitely turn viewers away, though I personally found quite refreshing. They stuck to the main story line without jam packing a compendium of background knowledge into the film. The acting was great, the set was limited to a house which really created an intimate environment for the viewer, and the film pulled off a cliché story while maintaining a certain level of uniqueness.

This is where the hypotheticals come in to play: If this was the pilot episode for a new TV series setting up a story line for an entire season (one in which the time-loop was resolved early and didn't play-out all season) then this would be flipping fantastic, and would have every viewer intrigued and ready to watch the next episode. As you would expect in a really great pilot episode, the ending left me smiling while simultaneously giving the finger to my TV screen. If a second episode was out, no way I'd be choosing to write this instead of finding out what comes next. However, this wasn't a pilot episode, it was a movie. Which kind of changes my tune a bit, and leaves me still giving the finger to my TV, though without the accompaniment of a smile. I really hope they somehow expand on this with a sequel, or turn it into a TV show, but those are hypotheticals.

I still choose to give this a higher rating, because it could be the beginning of something awesomely awesome. If I were you, I'd give it a watch and see for yourself... Here's to OPTIMISM!!