I don’t think it’s nitpicky at all, it’s touching on what I see as legitimate problems with the movie.
The Jes we follow throughout the movie (other than the very beginning, which we only find out later involved two of them), we’ll call her “Jes Prime.”
My first problem was figuring out how things were layered on the boat. In the first “loop” we witness, we see everyone get on the boat, Jes Prime eventually confronts a masked Jes, and when they fight it out, masked Jes goes overboard. Now the second loop begins, and at first it seems obvious what will happen: Jes Prime will do everything the masked Jes just did in the first loop. It’s going fine until the confrontation with Victor back in the dining room, where Jes Prime clearly deviates from what masked Jes did in the first loop because she confronts Victor and the “new” Jes from the second loop. Ok, at this point the twist has twisted further. I’m starting to think it’s going to go all Primer on us (lots of overlapping layers).
But my initial objection to the movie starts here. This second loop ends with Jes Prime, after having followed the red-head up to the pile of red-heads, looking down as new Jes, and a masked Jes (right up until this point, Jes Prime being on her second loop but still not wearing a mask, we’re thinking maybe it’s going to be on her third loop that she actually dons the mask herself) fighting with the axes and stuff again, but this scene ends with new-Jes killing masked Jes instead of masked Jes going overboard.
Ok, so now you’ve lost me. Everything keeps repeating (tons of redheads), but obviously not reliably. We never see Jes Prime go through that same confrontation that ends in one Jes killing another (I mean on the boat) as either the killer or the victim. It’s no longer a series of interlocking layers, it’s now just the case that clearly this keeps happening, but there’s not a definite rhyme or reason to how it plays out each time.
It’s sending a sort of mixed signal that no, things don’t happen the same way each time, and yet at almost every turn there’s evidence that yes, this particular thing has happened many times.
I slowly came to terms with it in that vague, fuzzy sense, and the movie was kinda still working for me. Don’t try to analyze how the pieces fit. They don’t really, they just keep happening sort of haphazardly. Ok. Roll with it. We go through Jes Prime’s third loop, where she’s the masked Jes, which ends in the way the first loop did with the masked version going overboard, only now that’s Jes Prime, and we follow the story off the boat as she washes up.
Cool twists, ok, she comes back, kills herself at home, the beginning is explained, roll credits!
Or at least, they should have.
Cause now here we go, pelican to the windshield, ok, all this has clearly happened before. She’s not out of the loop. She’s just run the course of the smaller loops inside the bigger loops. The script was written with a spirograph.
Crash, bang, guess Jes Prime had better catch a cab to the dock and do it right this time, roll credits, now the movie doesn’t work. There’s been no indication throughout Jes Prime’s experiences that she’s had anything more than a fuzzy déjà vu regarding what has happened in the previous loops. But as the movie ends, there’s nothing to make us think she has now forgotten those experiences. So the movie is ending in a decidedly different place than it started. As far as we can logically assume, she’s heading onto the boat with full knowledge of how it all plays out. Now is when things should get interesting, right? Shouldn’t this be the start of the third act? Or is the point just that she will always be in this loop, but here is what it looked like the very first time it happened? Well what’s the fun in that?
There’s also the question of why any of this happens to Jes in the first place. I’m not asking for you to explain a spooky ghost ship, I’m ok with that as the central conceit of the movie, but there’s no explanation given for why Jes is in the middle of it. Why isn’t anyone else vaguely aware of the looping? I mean, you could argue it’s because they’re not surviving any loops, Jes is killing them every time, but that doesn’t work for me. Maybe you’ll disagree and think I’m splitting hairs here, but I can live with the macguffin being turtles all the way down. The ghost ship is stuck in a time loop because it is, because it is, because it is, because it is. Fine. But as it applies to our protagonist, I need a little more explanation for why she starts killing people in the first place, why they all have to die for her to get out of the loop. What makes her special to this story?
I think the reason this all disappoints me most is that there was a line about how her son gets upset if she doesn’t do everything exactly the same way. That would have been a great fit as the theme for the movie, and I was hoping it’d be the impetus for why this is happening specifically to Jes. I was even entertaining theories based on her opening consolation to her son about nightmares that this would turn out to be her nightmare, maybe literally, a breakdown from her struggles with her child. I was almost ready for this movie to pull off “And it was all a dream” in a satisfactory way.
But if they really meant the movie to work on that level, they completely ruined it. First by blurring the logic in the looping–removing the exactness that would have made it a thematic fit, and then leaving us with a non-ending as she starts the whole thing over with memories apparently intact, something that should have been explored itself instead of offered as a conclusion.
