It just hit me. The reason there’s a pile of gulls is she killed the bird that went with them. Duh.
So no piles of kids then…
It would have worked in just about any setting past to future. Time loops aside, it’s basically a haunted house ride for most of the length after all, and haunted houses can be set up anywhen.
I’m just thinking about it because TimeCrimes, this, and Primer are all modern day. But it’s a lovely way to tell a story.
I will say that the “person in mask turns out to be YOU!” part is pretty weak in both movies.
Woot. A delve into the wikipedia article’s history produces this:
This film is an adaptation of the story of Sisyphus whose fate is for all eternity to push a rock up a mountain; on the top, the rock rolls down again and Sisyphus has to start over. Jess tries to save the lives of her son and friends only to watch them die.
There are two distinct phases to the total cycle denoted by A and B. Events happening in these phases are similar but not identical. By having an A and B phase the audience is fooled into thinking that Jess is altering the cycle when in fact she is simply playing her proper role in the alternate phase. In each phase there are three versions of Jess denoted by 1, 2 and 3. The phase alternates between A and B each time all the minor characters are killed and the tertiary Jess character is thrown overboard. The surviving two Jess characters advance from primary to secondary and secondary to tertiary, respectively and a new primary Jess character boards the ship.
A phase: (Film focuses on A1-Jess)
Once the group is on the Aeolus they read about the story of Sisyphus at which point A2-Jess drops her keys and they are found by the group. The entire group enters the ballroom of the ship where A1-Jess catches a glimpse of A2-Jess. Victor runs after A2-Jess and ends up outside where he is confronted by A2-Jess. A2-Jess accidentally fatally injures Victor. A3-Jess has her character shift and becomes the masked killer.
Gregg and Jess walk away from Sally and Downey and discover the note written in Downey’s blood to go to the theatre. A1-Jess walks away from Gregg and heads for the ballroom.
Sally and Downy are told to go to the theatre by A3-Jess. On their way they see blood trails from where A3-Jess dragged Greg’s body out of the theatre. A1-Jess kills Victor in the ballroom after he attacks her. We are tricked into thinking A1-Jess then runs to the theatre but in fact A2-Jess shows up in the theatre. This is because after escaping the theatre unharmed this Jess obtains a knife. This knife is used by tertiary Jess in the next cycle to attack Sally and Downy in the bedroom.
A3-Jess kills Gregg, Sally and Downey in the theatre while A2-Jess flees the theatre and gets the knife. A2-Jess, with the knife, is on the top deck of the ship and is heard running by A1-Jess who is immediately attacked by A3-Jess. A2-Jess has no further role in the A cycle. A1-Jess eventually wins the struggle and throws A3-Jess overboard. The cycle is complete. A1-Jess becomes B2-Jess. A2-Jess becomes B3-Jess.
B phase: (Film focuses on B2-Jess)
B2-Jess resets the skipping record and then sees the new group about to board the Aeolus. In the hallway she drops her keys for the new primary group to hear and runs into the bedroom to see the note to go to the theatre written in Downey’s blood. Downey was killed in the theatre in the preceding A phase so this note was made using Downey’s blood from the B phase that preceded this B phase.
B2-Jess fatally injures Victor on the deck then goes below deck, scribbles another note “If they board kill them all”, takes a shotgun and loses her locket down the grate. This scene shows the audience that Jess cannot alter the total cycle and is in fact playing her proper role in the B phase of the total cycle.
B2-Jess prevents B1-Jess from killing Victor in the ballroom. B2-Jess then saves Downey and Sally from being killed in the theatre where Gregg is killed. Even though this Jess didn’t witness the theatre slaying in the A phase she is aware of B3-Jess’s location thanks to déjà vu. B3-Jess is grazed in the head by B2-Jess.
B2-Jess gives Downey the shotgun and goes to look for Victor. She returns to the ballroom where his body has been thrown overboard.
B3-Jess tricks Sally and Downey into following her into a bedroom where she attacks them using the knife she obtained as A2-Jess. Sally escapes with a fatal wound to her chest while Downey is killed.
B2-Jess searches for Sally who makes the distressed call to the next primary group. She finds Sally amongst a pile of dead Sallies and gives her the brown jacket.
A3-Jess finds A1-Jess and is thrown overboard after a struggle. When Sally dies the cycle resets. B1-Jess becomes A2-Jess. B2-Jess becomes A3-Jess.
A phase: (Film focuses on A3-Jess)
A3-Jess has a character shift when she realizes that she must kill everyone in order to save them. She goes below deck and writes “Go to the theatre” in Downey’s blood before dragging his body out of the bedroom and throwing him overboard. Next A3-Jess drags Gregg out of the theatre. Victor’s body has already been disposed of.
A3-Jess tells Sally and Downey to go to the theatre then leaves to get another shotgun and become the masked killer.
When Gregg offends A1-Jess she leaves him alone and A3-Jess confronts him in a balcony above the theatre where Sally and Downey are waiting. A3-Jess kills Gregg, Sally and Downey in the theatre. A2-Jess flees the theatre and gets the knife which she will use as B3-Jess.
A2-Jess is on the top deck of the ship with the knife and is heard running by A1-Jess who is immediately attacked by A3-Jess. A2-Jess has no further role in the A cycle. A1-Jess drops down one level and grabs an axe. A1-Jess attempts to distract A3-Jess by throwing an object. A3-Jess remembers having done this when she played the part of A1-Jess and cuts her off. A3-Jess ultimately loses the struggle and is thrown overboard where she washes up on shore.
Jess goes home and we find out that the real Jess is abusive towards her son. The real Jess is killed by Sisyphus-Jess. In an attempt to escape the loop she puts the body in her car, takes her son and flees. She hits a seagull and throws its body onto a pile of dead seagulls. She gets back into her car and is involved in a head on collision with a truck. She escapes ‘unharmed’ and is greeted by a taxi driver. Sisyphus-Jess is in fact already dead and the entire film has taken place inside her constructed punishment.
It is likely that the loop started when real Jess, distracted because she was abusing her son, died in the head on collision along with her son. After dying, real Jess becomes Sisyphus-Jess. The cab driver, playing the role of Hermes, escorts her to the harbor where she will join the next primary group about to board Aeolus.
Just watched this.
I like the whole Sisyphus thing in the wikipedia article. It explains the miraculous taxi driver, if nothing else.
My first impression was that it kind of resets when she sleeps on the sailboat, basically because she was concussed in the accident, went to sleep, and then lost the memory of the previous loops.
Because what’s a time loop movie without a little amnesia?
AHHHHH. Now that weird bit near the car makes sense. That’s why she’s standing there unharmed after the accident.
Huh? The reason there’s a pile of gulls is she hit one with her car, she goes to throw it off the road, and that’s the big reveal that David Bowie’s machine was actually cloning the gulls, not transporting them!
Oh, sorry. I mean, that’s the big reveal that we’re still inside a bigger loop. It didn’t end when she got off the boat, she’s hit that gull on the road dozens of times before too.
Is that what you were trying to say and I just missed it, or were you saying the gulls mean something else?
hermes!? i thought the taxi driver was Death (that’s right, i’m tossing out a capital “d” there). she breaks her promise to him of returning to pay the fare. countless dead, including an autistic child, for cab fare? death is hardcore about his monies. when she wakes up on the boat, her memory resets.
but i like the wiki explanation better. any reason given for the edit? was it the scriptwriter doing a wiki edit?
also: melissa george (jess) really does woman in horrific circumstances well. she was pretty good in http://www.netflix.com/Movie/The_Betrayed/70118227 which has the bonus of having a ridiculous plot point that was ridiculed in the simpsons…16 years before the movie was made.
I would guess that people objected to such massive spoilers being in the only Wikipedia article about the film. I mean, the basic plot spoiler is spoily, but not quite so step-by-step. Either that or it was considered too subjective, or inappropriate for an encyclopedia entry, or one of those other things Wikipedia folks get picky about.
I was saying it’s the gull that followed the boat, which is why it’s being duplicated in the “real world” but nothing else is.
I was hoping that we’d see it on the beach as well, but I went back and checked and it wasn’t there.
The wikipedia version at best doesn’t conclusively explain the movie, at worst it doesn’t match. I just double checked (though I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if a triple-check catches something I’m misinterpreting). Sorry for quoting the whole thing, but I need to highlight a couple parts that wouldn’t work at all if I don’t get the whole thing.
I bolded the transitions in nomenclature at the end of each phase. They talk us through phase A twice, but that’s because the second time through, it’s still the same phase A, we’re just seeing it from a new perspective.
So then I spent two hours learning the basics of OminGraffle on my iPad, and I’d say it’s paid for itself already:
The green and purple paths each represent a single version of some Jes’s experience through the movie. All of the changes (except where noted with overboards and getting on the boats) are just visualizations of the changing nomenclature the wikipedia uses. I just want to be clear that when I have arrows going from A1 to B2 or something, that’s not two Jes’s fighting/confronting each other or anything, that’s just wikipedia changing their names for the next phase.
The green sequence is the version of Jes we follow through the movie. So there are either one or two logical problems. One is that there’s a second “sequence of Jes’s” that at no point intersects ours. That’s the purple sequence. It starts with a new Jes getting on the boat in phase B, where clearly different events are happening (Sally being shot vs. Sally being stabbed, for example) but that can’t be any version of our Jes getting on the boat, or it would be phase A again. The only Jes’s we ever see outside of the boat are our main Jes (green path), and the maybe-original-mortal-abusive-mom-Jes, the one in the dress, that in no reality ever comes into the boat scenario. So the Jes that gets onto the boat in phase B comes out of no where. She makes it out of phase B and plays a role in phase A, makes it back into phase B, and then disappears into no where.
Now here’s where we might have a second problem. The wiki said at the end of phase B “A3-Jess finds A1-Jess and is thrown overboard after a struggle.” If we take that literally, they’re referring to some A3 and A1 Jes not previously accounted for in phase B. And more importantly, it cannot be the A3 and A1 in phase A being “overlapped” because this A3 Jes is actually killed. It’s at 1:06, I checked. This Jes isn’t just thrown overboard, she takes several direct axe hits. That’s it for her. That interpretation is in my diagram. A more generous interpretation is that it’s a typo, and they meant “B3-Jess finds B1-Jess and is thrown overboard after a struggle.” That doesn’t involve even more Jes’s coming out of no where, it just means my purple path should end with the death instead of “?”, but it definitely still ends there.
Any way you slice it, we have a wholly separate and unaccounted for Jes-sequence weaving back and forth across both phases.
I briefly considered that my assumptions about the big loop were flawed. Maybe somehow the Jes that is thrown overboard alive at the end of phase A becomes the new unaccounted for Jes that arrives in phase B. Even discounting the actual story problems that introduces, if you follow that through, we now have a (convoluted) line, not a loop. If you cross the green and purple paths at all, you break everything, because of that dying Jes at the end of phase B.
So… I win, right? I really hope I didn’t miss some huge obvious point, but hey, it wouldn’t be the first time. Let me know what you think.
i wish i could contribute thoughts other than something that sounds a lot like, “Wholly Schmidt.” i’ll try and double check your work tomorrow.
I would have to rewatch at least that scene, but my impression was that there’s no reason to believe that any version of Jess survives the boat. She wakes up on the beach, but we don’t see her get there, and best guess is that she’s already actually dead for the entirety of the loop, so further deaths wouldn’t necessarily mean anything.
The “overboard alive” Jes is the masked one that we actually see briefly telling her opponent Jess before going overboard “You have to kill them all”. Then she ducks an axe swing, tumbling over the side. She’s wearing the dark jumpsuit, which we also see in the waves behind the Jes that wakes up on shore. In the order shown in the movie, this is what we witness the first and third time we see the Jes/Jes showdown, first from the perspective of the Jes that stays onboard, then on the later pass through this scene from the perspective of the Jes going over. It seems clear enough to me she’s the one that survives the boat.
In retrospect, my flow chart needs some conveyor belts.
Pretty good looking flow chart there, Wholly. I think I need to watch the movie again to get a better grasp on things. It kind of bugs me how A2 Jes doesn’t really do anything. Why was she not trying to intervene like B2 Jes?
I’m glad someone else noticed the key mistake. Based on the rules of the movie shouldn’t there be a pile of like 200 keys lying around?
I still don’t understand why all the food becomes rotten. And the turn table thing bugs me a bit. When she first bumps into it it seems like that’s what sets everything back into motion (the movie even “skips” a little bit). I thought “Oh cool, it’s like she’s paying that record on repeat.” No, seems like that didn’t really matter at all.
I think it would also fit in with the Sissyphus myth if she’d done something worse than be a mediocre single mother. Sissyphus got punished because he defied Zeus and tricked Death (multiple times).
I got the feeling that there was still some “give” to events, so there may have been more rubberbanding Jes’s and more loops than we saw.
For instance, when she’s at the back of the ship, watching the empty Triangle float away, after seeing herself arrive again, what if she’d have jumped? She may have been killed because the fall was too high (so begin the loop again), but maybe she sometimes landed just right and was able to swim to the capsized sailboat.
And if she had? I’d bet she’d be exhausted and fall asleep on the hull of the sailboat thinking she had escaped, only to wakeup to see the Aeolus bearing down on her again.
Now I may be writing my own movie here, but we’ve seen that there’s play in her various replays, so sometimes Sally is shot, and sometimes she’s stabbed. Sometimes Jes goes overboard alive, and sometimes dead.
What if, one time, she just didn’t shoot her boyfriend on the balcony? What would happen then? I bet they’d still all end up dead, somehow.
I’d argue it needs a (mostly unseen) C phase, where a post child-death Jes gets back onto the boat and becomes “headshot” Jes. With her ultimately being killed the loop is closed.
Then there’s an A1 and A2 Jes that alternate (and intermingle) with B1 being the actual binding between the two.
The movie is clearly set up for that to be the case, but I’m guessing they thought it would be spookier to open up the loops.
i think you’re right about the c loop and it works out.
if someone has the time we can list every jess appearance at every location (masked, innocent, and crazy conversion) then follow a single jess so she touches each appearance (or it is possible for that given a c loop), we’ll find out if it works out all right.
wholly’s graph would be righted if it has the overboard jess going back to the purple “gets on boat” instead of the green “gets on boat”, and the red overboard should go to the c loop “gets on boat”…maybe?
I don’t think it’s possible for there to ba single Jes. A1 watches A2 board the boat, and vice versa.
I guess the question is do those alternate timelines converge at the end, and always lead to one A-Jes or the other being thrown off the boat while the B Jes always dies?