K-SCORE: 13
Writer/Director: Tony Elliott
Starring: Robbie Amell, Rachel Taylor, Shaun Benson, Gray Powell
Spoiler Level: Major
“This might be a new record for inventor with the least amount of knowledge on his invention in story history.”
This isn’t fair. They keep making these time travel films on lower and lower budgets, reworking the scripts until they require no more than four characters, no special effects, and only a single location. Not only that, they’re making them more accessible than ever, plopping them on Netflix instant watch as fodder for my brothers to just throw on one night and then demand that I see so that I can explain to the internet why the story doesn’t work.
Because it sucks, that’s why! It’s awful! It don’t make no goddamn sense!
THE SCOTT 200
As far as universe ending paradoxes go, ARQ’s is pretty solid. I mean, yes our plucky group of rebels + two mercenary traitors + one ruggedly handsome but bafflingly stupid engineer are stuck for all eternity battling it out inside a very poorly lit concrete bunker pretending to be a home, but at least they have those apples! This movie is great because I am guessing everyone on the cast and crew asked the writer/director (I’m just assuming he’s one guy) “Why didn’t they just do X?” with X being any number of reasonable human behaviors. And each one got the same response, “Shut up, Charlie!” I give ARQ 173 PardoxPoints out of 200. I give Kyle’s review 5 out of 5, but only for one of the most beautiful sentences ever written – “Hannah, is a freedom-fighting survivalist in a post-apocalyptic world where the air itself is toxic and food is scarce, who, months after being tortured by the mega-corporation that destroyed the world, comes up with the brilliant idea of using her new band of rebels to rob her former boyfriend / experimental energy scientist.”
…
Okay, so what you have here is a looped time time-travel storyline with memory retention a la Groundhog Day or Live Die Repeat aka The Edge of Tomorrow aka Full-Metal Bitch aka That Tom Cruise Scif-fi One with the Semi-Robotic Aliens, No Not the One with the Swimming Pool in the Sky and the Clones, The Other One. This is actually one of the easiest time travel premises to write. Reset all the circumstances except for the protagonist’s knowledge base and the previous iterations might as well have been dreams or practice runs for the finale. Arq screws it up in two essential ways. One, by allowing more than one character to retain memories, it draws into focus the question of why the memories of previous iterations are retained. This is worsened by the fact that characters start remembering the different days after a different number of trials for reasons that are never explained. Then, towards the end, we learned of the potential for them to start forgetting previous attempts, which serves to amplify the confusion of the premise while at once making the story way less meaningful. Which is always what you want to do with your stories.
The second and most wonderful way that Arq blunders this already well-explored film concept is by drawing a literal line around its central location and saying, “Okay, everything we’ve been talking about only applies to stuff within this circle.” So, I’m to believe that time itself is looping over and over again within a house and outside the house things are progressing as normal. What’s going on with, say, the sun? Is the rest of the Earth spinning right along at a normal clip and that circular chunk of land just keeps jolting back in time every few hours because if so, shouldn’t it be a desolate stranded block of dirt and rubble, ripped into the vacuum of space and obliterated upon the very first reset? What happens if you take the oddly-often-talked-about apples that they have in their fridge, for example, and chuck them outside that circle? Are they duplicated? I have no idea why they decided to include the one scene where the generic guy and the generic girl walk outside, but I’m glad they did because if they hadn’t I would have spent way too much time talking about the evil corporation known as TORUS and the finer details of the given circumstances and character choices beyond the time travel.
Hannah, is a freedom-fighting survivalist in a post-apocalyptic world where the air itself is toxic and food is scarce, who, months after being tortured by the mega-corporation that destroyed the world, comes up with the brilliant idea of using her new band of rebels to rob her former boyfriend / experimental energy scientist. Her band of four contains no fewer than two traitors, one of whom is literally the man who spent months torturing her, and she fails to recognize that. Her plan, meet up with her ex-boyfriend the night before, sleep with him, wake up, and have herself be fake kidnapped so that both of them can be tortured so that he reveals the location of a resource called credits that he really doesn’t care that much about anyway.
“He doesn’t even seem to know that it has the ability to record and play videos”
Renton, is a scientist and engineer that invents a time-travelling, energy-sustaining, generator in what appears to be a spare bedroom in his house that he knows shockingly little about. This might be a new record for inventor with the least amount of knowledge on his invention in story history. Apart from a few command prompts on the software built into the arq machine, Renton is only able to regurgitate fairly obvious results of what the machine does and has done. He doesn’t even seem to know that it has the ability to record and play videos from previous time loops for most of the film, and after he learns that, he doesn’t think to record some for himself nor does he think to go searching for previous recordings. He and Hannah are much more interested in the chronologically inconsistent shatter-marking on the science board behind the arq’s webcam. Despite being the first character gifted with the foresight the machine provides, he never displays any adaptability to his conflict and instead gets himself shot with astounding frequency. It’s pathetic that, soon after realizing what the machine does, Renton only wants to shut it down, which he always has the power to do. Somehow though, he fails to shut it down, and we think that he fails something like nine times, but on the ninth attempt we learn that he has actually failed thousands of times, and he can only remember his last nine failures. Imagine how horribly ineffective you are as a person if your whole goal is to pull the plug on a machine in your house that you built that only you even remotely understand and you’re so bad at getting that done that the universe itself creates a timeloop whereby it’s possible for you to fail unendingly for all eternity.
Sonny, is a villainous merc working for TORUS. He retains memories of the previous day’s iterations just once and immediately starts to outwit Hannah and Renton who have known that he’s evil for several tries now. Three times he comes so close to accomplishing his much more complicated objective of getting the arq in the hands of TORUS without time being reset, dying, or the machine being destroyed, and Renton and Hannah have to resort to dying to reset time. Why they’re ever shocking themselves, or getting shot is beyond me, but I especially don’t understand why they would ever tell Sonny any of the machine’s codes? Just let him kill you and try again where you don’t get captured by him, tied up, and held at gunpoint.
One look! One look! I don't think so!
This a story whose conflict is supposedly of world-defining importance. It’s a post-apocalyptic premise where apples are scarce, the atmosphere has been poisoned, something really bad happened to Australia, and the survivors are fighting amongst themselves utilizing ultra-powerful weapons such as bad Christmas carols. We never get an explanation as to how Earth fell into such disrepair, but after seeing what kinds of minds our future is entrusted with, we can kind of extrapolate on our own. And if this guy is the planet’s greatest mind however many years from now, we probably deserved it.
Magnum!
Dear God, it's beautiful...