What about the school marching band having the same logo as the band on the ship? They also play the same song as the record skipping. Which makes me think everything after the car crash is a dream/death.
I thought the record skipping (and a few other places) shows that this isn’t a solid run-through but X numbers of run-throughs? They were short handing that this isn’t a complete from the start singular run-through but one of many of this track. The food spoils because again, it isn’t a simple a1 a2 etc but hundreds of times this continues (which yeah the food should reset but like most things in the movie, don’t stare at them too hard).
That’s pretty much where I landed on this too, although you put it better. The bulk of my analysis and chart were just aimed at showing the problems in the deleted wikipedia version; I don’t think the movie was actually so carefully arranged. I do wonder if they thought it was when they made it.
My opinion… at no point in the film are we watching the real world. Prior to the start of the movie, Jes was a shitty mother who abused her child and died in a car accident that also killed the child. The entire movie is Jes’s Sisyphian hell where she gets away from the burden of her child to be with friends to end up on the boat where she has to avoid being killed and kill her friends to get back to her son and kill her other self for being a shitty mother in a form of redemption that she doesn’t get to keep when she wrecks the car and gets into the cab to start all over again. Her memory is mostly wiped in the cab and slowly everything is revealed to her as part of her suffering and so that she can achievement redemption and then have it stolen from her. As she stands in the road looking at the car wreck before getting in the cab, she remembers everything, all the cycles, that’s she’s been doing this for a very long time, but she gets in the cab anyway because maybe next time she’ll succeed.
There is only one Jes - the one we follow, the other versions of her are props in her suffering because she always has been her own enemy.
Is it me, or did the cycles alternate the direction they approach the boat? I swore they first saw the mysterious figure standing on the port side of the bow, but when it first resets then Jess sees them coming from the starboard side. And when it resets again its back to the port. I felt that signified something.
I liked the movie, but I definitely thought the line was broken and this thread reinforces that. My main beef is that the line could never begin in the first place considering that it’s same-Jess-prime stuck in the loop. At some point she has to enter the loop, and it doesn’t feel possible that bitch-Jess could enter normally since that would mean her son is alive somewhere during the prime loop but not afterwards. Too much of a difference for me.
But overall a good effort, although the dead kid was a given as soon as you realize she is back in civilization, there’s no other motivation that will work to get her back on the boat.
This works, but all it implies is that there’s just one big loop of crime->punishment->redemption that is completely removed from any weird and wacky time-loop antics. That makes the movie as a whole much less interesting. A difficult puzzle is intriguing - an impossible puzzle isn’t a puzzle at all.
A good film which falls short of being a great film mainly because it doesn’t tie together. The awesome ah-hah moment is when you find the time loops, but then at the end it clearly isn’t a time loop it’s punishment, and then you look deeper and see that it doesn’t tie together and in effect many of the Jess’s must be not Jess, because the loop isn’t a loop.
I don’t think that’s intentional, but as a loop it fails in many areas. A shame, because while it looks like it is the film is fantastic.
Well what other ending would you guys find satisfying? That she breaks the cycle and redeems herself and everyone has a happy cry at the ending? I mean that’d be fine too but I like the idea that she is, essentially, in a Hell of her own doing.
Most of the film fails as a closed loop. It’s not just the ending that messes it up. Her early reactions on the boat the first time through make no sense at all once you see the pile of bodies that indicates this is no where near the first time through. She has to have some sort of reset or else she could just kill all her friends on the little boat and never get on the big one. “It was horrible! The boat capsized and I was the only one to get to safety. cry”
Also, on a closed loop, half of the stuff we see happen couldn’t happen the very first time through. The first time, there would be no other Jes on her second or third loop, there would just be one Jes, so there wouldn’t be sounds to investigate or someone to shoot at them. How does it start? Who kills everyone the first time?
For me, the only reason the film works is a) we come in “in the middle”, b) her memories, to some degree, reset, and c) it isn’t a closed loop.
I think the sleep is intended to be a reset, otherwise it fails on every level to make sense, “I can alter things” she would said as she repeats her actions for the thousandth time.
The film works because the premise is almost cool enough to distract from the fact that the implementation is massively flawed.
I stumble upon so few creepy flicks that make me think as this one did. I am not sure whether I want to read the thread or watch it again and then read the thread and then watch it a third time or whatever.
I definitely have been thinking about it and how well it all fits together. Often times when a movie catches me like this, I usually stop and say to myself, “Man, I really enjoyed this, now do I want to risk ruining it by beating it to death with analysis or just let it be.” I am kinda at that point.
Also, Wholly Schmidt’s input has assured me that my hyper-analysis will never be thorough enough so why bother. :)
I decided to scratch a mark on the inside of my forearm after I watched it for the first time this weekend…then I looked down at my arm and there were already 86 marks in various stages of healing!!!
What I liked was how it showed how she could change things, but somehow NOT change things without having the nonchanges seem forced. Each individual scene, each choice she made, made sense at that moment given what she knew/felt at that moment.
Also, I liked how the movie gives a bunch of “aha!” moments. For instance when she first had that fight with the masked character I was thinking “How is she able to match this guy in melee combat? I hope we find out later.”
My feeling on the things that piled up was that they were markers of a sort. As she goes through this progression, she is taunted by the ability to change things, giving her hope. But periodically she’s confronted with reminders that she is still locked into an overall path. That’s why there aren’t piles of everything she’s interacted with everywhere.
