Yeah, this was my sense. More Triangle spoilers below!
Summary
I wouldn’t say the movie had any plot holes. More just some weird logic. But the dream-like purgatory angle covers that.
The main thing, for me, was how when the version of Jess that we’re following finally puts on the “mask” and decides to kill everyone on the ship, she had already experienced herself fighting her “masked” identity, and she knew how that fight would end: with the masked version losing. And yet when she’s wearing the mask and performing those same actions, she doesn’t do anything differently, and therefore her masked self predictably loses the fight and falls overboard.
This felt like the biggest spot where the movie could’ve really taken advantage of the fact that multiple versions of Jess are moving through the loop in a kind of clockwise spiral, and had her different selves perform different actions when they have different levels of knowledge. But the movie leaned into the repeating purgatory logic instead. Which, again, I wouldn’t call a plot hole. Rather, it’s a decision about how to shape the movie’s tone, which says something about the movie’s own attitude toward guilt/redemption/justice/etc.
I also watched Men over the weekend. A touch too allegorical for my tastes, but the color palette was definitely effective. My favorite part was how during the climactic sequence, the main character finally got exhausted with the gory spectacle and ended up walking away. Like she’s just done with the bullshit from all these men. That felt like a realistic reaction, which I can’t claim I’ve seen much in the horror genre, or really in any genre. Seems like it’s more common to keep ramping up the horror, but this movie deflated the horror so that you’re left with something that’s kind of pathetically comic.
every time she takes a nap before the storm, after she’s made the choice to speed-run the loop and “do it right” she wakes up with no memory of how the game/loop works. She has to relearn over three-however many-revolutions that everyone has to die except her to make another yacht with new versions of the characters arrive. She (like the audience) assumes the loop only encompasses the Aeolus and if living Jesszs keep arriving, that means there’s another chance her son is alive if she can get off the ship to get to him.
I kind of see the point - why didn’t Jess just jump off the ship to return to the mainland? I almost think there’s a missing scene that might have explained it: If they’d have made it clear that the only way she can survive bailing from the Aeolus and not be lost at sea (surely there are lifejackets on this vessel) is by clinging to the yacht wreckage of the Triangle which naturally will make its way back to the beach due to current - that might have cleared it up. If they’d showed bad/masked Jess grabbing onto the overturned yacht and then show it winding up on the beach with her, that’s why she has to kill everyone to escape and return because she has to generate an abandoned copy of the smaller boat to make it to the mainland. By the time she’s killed everyone, the second more-knowledgable Jess one loop behind her who’s witnessed this is fighting back not knowing the person in the mask is herself so she can’t avoid it.
That’s just my head-canon but your point makes sense. The movie is also showing no matter what free-will choices Jess thinks she makes, the circular loop is fate (piles of notes, piles of necklaces, piles of seagulls, piles of her friend and she’s trapped and there’s no way out of it if she keeps insisting the cab drop her at the harbor to start again.
I didn’t even think about the possibility of her jumping off the ship! That’s a much larger deviation than what I had in mind. I’m talking about more small-scale stuff.
When her unmasked self fights her masked self, for example, there’s a scuffle on the stairs on the deck, where her masked self loses some of the advantage in the fight. But when our version of Jess finally puts on the mask, having already experienced this scuffle on the stairs (twice! once by participating as the unmasked combatant, and once by watching the fight from afar), she performs all the exact same actions that instigate the scuffle. She could’ve avoided the stairs entirely, or even avoided going onto the deck, since she knew how things would end if she went up there. She could’ve made countless small-scale adjustments during the fight or the lead-up to the fight to try to avoid falling overboard.
This has nothing to do with her memory-wipe from the nap at the start of the movie. All of her knowledge about the fight is gained after she wakes up. The fact that she performs the same sequence of actions, even with this knowledge, feels less like her decision and more like the movie making a statement about her lack of agency in the ship’s purgatory.
If there’s any moment where she can actually make a different choice, it seems like that moment would be inside the cab, and that might be the only moment. Each time she decides to leave the driver waiting and get on the boat, she’s “locking” herself into at least one more run through the loop. But perhaps she can’t even change things when she’s in the cab.
Triangle rules please watch it blind if you have any plans to!
I see what you mean. And that does make sense if Jess were thinking logically. As it is she’s under high-stress, facing an elaborate ticking clock on a huge, unfamiliar ship with twisty passages all alike where either a masked person or a copy of herself is running around killing people, and while she’s quickly learns generally where landmarks like the Theater and the Dining Hall and the radio room are after a loop or two, even late stage she’s probably still confused about precisely which door leads to what part of a random deck and where in the clockwork she is and may have stumbled into the other side of a fight she’s already had with herself without realizing beforehand what she was getting into. And there is the confusing sub loop where one Jess actually kills a masked Jess (who is possibly trying to reason with her which is different) and kicks her overboard (dead? I think - but then she becomes the masked Jess because that gave her the idea that she can come back.) She often seems taken aback about running into the aftermath of previous events like the bloody hook. Even though we’ve seen it over and over, those versions of her have not and are blundering around in a high-stakes door-slamming farce. She does try to relay information to her former self, but it’s always at a point where a fight is happening and there’s no chance of explaining.
TL;DR: from Jess’s perspective under high stress, it’s possible she might not have realized where she was in the timeline or exactly when she would be walking into the other end of a fight she already had from a new perspective. She’s doesn’t benefit from our outside perspective and for every iteration of her this is the first time things have happened. I personally can’t remember a phone number the first time someone tells it to me!
The masked version of Jess that we’re following has seen the events the same number of times we see them in the movie: three times. Once as the unmasked combatant, once from afar, and finally as the masked combatant. But I agree that she’s not thinking logically. To quote myself from earlier in this thread: She’s clearly not thinking logically, to say the least.
And now we’ve come full circle in our own loop!
I should stop before I get too annoying, though. I love talking about the nuts and bolts of time-loops like this, and I could do it for hours, but I know that it can get aggravating for other people. Back when I was a teenager, I loved Final Fantasy VIII because it could also inspire endless discussions about time/space weirdness, and I’ve been into dissecting time-loops ever since.
Oh yeah, huge fan of VIII and also IX. Those were formative for me! I drifted away from the franchise after XII, but I still think about the older games as reference points for what to do (or what not to do) in terms of certain elements of design.
I want to make a more serious plug for Godzilla Minus One. Although I’m a fan of Godzilla in general, I’m under no illusion that these are good movies. GMO on the other hand is a very good movie. Far from just being a monster movie, it’s really a movie about human beings and war and despair and redemption. Best movie of 2023.
Castle Rock (Netflix) is really good, but so far the ending of season 1 really really annoyed me. Our Henry Weaver turns out to be like Lacy. Except worse. Why? Does he ever listen to the Kid? Apart from that major qualm from S1, really good.
Here’s my three post roundup from the last two weeks:
Wonka (cinema): I didn’t have hopes for this going in. The trailer had made it look like a wussy distillation of a Harry Potter film. It also concealed the fact it was a musical. I like musicals, and when this turned out to be one, that was the first good surprise. The film is eventful without being breathless, aesthetically interesting, has many excellent performances, and the songs are even okay. Altogether, really good.
Bottoms (cinema): “Two unpopular queer high school students start a fight club to have sex before graduation.” I loved the trailer for this one. At first I didn’t find the motormouthed heroines funny enough, but once it reached the ridiculous weirdness of the fight club, and teenagers punching each other bloody, it all took off. It also deliberately creates a universe that seems to have nobody in it but the high school students. The classroom scenes are incredibly funny. e.g. Teacher casually asks class to reenact the treaty of Versailles.
Primeval (Disney+): 2007 killer croc film in the Anaconda mould, set entirely in Africa. American strong guy, hot chick and black sidekick go to warzone Burundi to get the story. Pretty tedious set-up, and film seemed to be doing a crummy job trying to be aware of colonialism and making tone deaf jokes on it. Really good location photography and I must grudgingly admit it all got better and better as it went.
Babes in Toyland (Disney+): 1961 musical/fantasy with Annette Funicello as Mary (Mary Quite Contrary - yes, literally) in a nursery rhyme kingdom, marrying Tom Piper. An evil landlord tries to get rid of Tom so he can marry her and get her money, too. Weird story, apparently based on an operetta, is an excuse for Wizard of Oz sets, dancing and tech set pieces. A magnificent production with great bits, but also ad hoc and sometimes draggy. It’s a shame a great schtick where Mary sings with various copies of herself happens while she’s admonishing herself for being such a tool at maths, in song ‘I can’t do the sum’. Okay, maybe they don’t get much education in Toyland.
Audition 1999 Japanese psych thriller / horror about a man who uses a sham actress auditioning process to look for a wife. Has a whopper reputation for being torturous to watch. As a zillion reviews point out, that’s confined to a torture sequence at the end. To me it seemed 80% an exceptional film, with a messy 20% that just can’t be resolved. It’s great to have those conversations with yourself where you say “Okay, this shot is evidence that A is real, and that means element B can’t be real”. But eventually if you keep doing this and you can’t get one sum that adds up, a la Babes in Toyland, you feel either cheated or that the director didn’t care about the solution. That’s where I ended up. Others have, too.
Murder on the Orient Express (Disney+) From 2017, the first of Kenneth Branagh’s Poirot series. I’ve seen all three, two of them twice now (this was my second view of this, after seeing it in cinema when it came out) and I increasingly like them all. I like his Poirot. I like his direction. If they move a little too briskly, that element is less of a concern on a re-review. They have a pristine look that’s beautiful but admittedly super computery. I would like to go watch the 70s/80s versions of these to see some real scenery shot on film.
Quiz Lady (Disney+): Disney stuck the icon for this in their new or featured section. I saw two Asian sisters in a comedy involving a quiz show. I like quiz shows and I felt like a laugh. Well, it turns out the knobs who airbrush people to create these icons had entirely disguised both Awkwafina and Sandra Oh – I could not recognise either of them in that icon! If I start a film and find Awkawfina’s in it (this has happened more than once) – and in this case the star – I am super happy. And in this she plays the ‘normal’ sister, as opposed to a wild character. It turned out to be very charming and funny. One drug hallucination sequence was a bit much, and I do think there’s a pretty good argument the sisters did technically cheat in the end, but things are silly enough I wasn’t too worried.
Crabs – 2021 comedy horror about an invasion of killer horseshoe crabs. They mess with some USA town’s prom night. Some fun, some really bad editing. Gets out of control with stupidity by the end and has giant robots fighting crabs. Too tedious overall.
An immigrant character called Radu is either the high or low point for the film (check reviews on IMDB - that’s how they fall. Some only discuss Radu. Some are about how Radu is the most annoying entity in cinema.) He was played by someone called Chase Padgett who is obviously a great improviser.
Hunger Games: Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes (cinema) The long title’s given me a good laugh, repeatedly. I’ve read the first three Hunger Games books and watched the four movies, of which two are worth watching and the first is easily the best. What’s crucial to a Hunger Games movie is – does it have a Hunger Games in it? This new prequel does, so that’s a big plus already. It then has a (if you’ve not read the book) completely unanticipated third act which is completely different. That was terrific for me going in cold, even more so for my friend who didn’t even know whose story the film was supposed to be. So overall, very good.
Okay, there was one moment that sucked, due to the film’s rating. A poor captive is being teased by a rich idiot girl through a fence, and she smashes a bottle and sticks it in the rich lady’s neck. This being, in the USA, a PG-13 film, they can’t show a throat cut. They should have just not shown it with some smart blocking. Instead, they show the broken glass sticking out of the woman’s neck, completely bloodless, sitting there, and it looks ridiculous.
The Marvels (Cinema) Wow, when I saw the Hunger Games, a film with a compelling and highly crafted narrative the day after Marvels, it made Marvels feel like ultracrap. Just the biggest load of piffle ever. So Captain Marvel and two other women will accidentally change places if they use their powers. This amounts to nothing – fights choreographed this way are pretty unfollowable and hard to read. The villain’s performance was terrible. There is almost no propulsion of narrative, just silliness. The FX also looked cheaper than average. I assume they just ran the computer renderers for shorter periods to save money.
Last night I watched my 88 Blu-ray of Rats: Night of Terror (1984)
It was part of the wave of 80’s Italian knock-off genre cinema. This one combines Mad Max / Escape from NY post-apocalyptics with killer animals.
Scavenging punks find some buildings that seem to be full of supplies. But once they set up camp there, they get attacked by… the rats. These are actually mice that were stirred in a tub of black goo, I learned in the behind-the-scenes. They never generate an iota of fear. They’re small, easy to jump over, walk around. Some scenes show them zipping along a cord to attack, but the fundamental premise that to go near them will be to result in your death, is not delivered at all. And all the characters are histrionic with fear. One woman screams at absolutely everything.
Rats is one of the most inane movies I’ve ever seen. I’ve seen thousands. I understand why it has a cult following. There’s almost no touchpost of sense in it.
I always marvel that director Bruno Mattei was able to make so many films. Nobody stopped him, and/or people kept giving him money. And yet if you pick a different one of his films - Hell of the Living Dead - then I’m the cult fan, watching it over and over.
I admit, the last shot of rats is both sort of monumentally idiotic, but also chilling.
Please enjoy the trailer for Rats, which opens with the line ‘Rats… what do they want from us?’ Trailer is NSFW, being full of rats, a little blood and a (cool) gross effect.
After this I’m not posting again 'til after xmas or someone else posts. Topic needs other people. But tonight I saw Saltburn. “The new meisterwork from Emerald Fennell” or words to that effect are words that appeared in the trailer.
A lower class unpopular guy attending Oxford befriends a charismatic guy everyone loves, who then invites him back to his mansion home, Saltburn, populated with all his weird upper class relatives. Drama ensues.
This film has excellent performances, and many great scenes that are socially and sexually confronting. I mean it does feel like it’s trying to get at you with a surfeit of them. But I found the main character’s behaviour incomprehensible and unbelievable for the middle act. Then I began to think, ‘Okay, this all can only make sense if YADA.’ And I was correct in my prediction, but YADA had the side-effect of retrospectively undercutting tons of other elements of the film.
Summarily, I felt Saltburn really tried to be a clever clogs, and didn’t stick it. And so came across as insincerely shocking, and felt weaker afterwards with time to think on it. This was also somewhat how I felt about Fennell’s previous film, Promising Young Woman, so now I’m one and a half times burnt.
The 1934 version of Babes in Toyland made a big impression on me as a kid. I’ll still watch it sometimes around the holiday season. Haven’t seen any of the newer adaptations though.
I recently watched Babylon, The Holdovers, and First Reformed, and I’d probably rank them as worst to best in that order. Babylon had some cool stuff going on, but it didn’t really “wow” me, and I think a movie like this kind of needs to “wow” you in order to work properly. The Holdovers was surprisingly good. Didn’t expect to enjoy it as much as I did. First Reformed, meanwhile, actually did “wow” me.
I want to see Saltburn and Poor Things, but I’ll probably wait to watch these until they’re streaming.
Saltburn is shot 4:3, which you can almost never see in a cinema (and was well done) so if you’re set on seeing it, I’d recommend seeing it in a cinema.
Tickets have been pricey for a while now, and money is tight, so I’ll usually only go to the theater if I feel strongly about supporting a specific movie. The Boy and the Heron, for instance! I don’t think I’m passionate enough about Saltburn, but maybe if I happen to snag a discount ticket…
Was there something Escape from NY-y in the thread that I missed?
On that topic, here’s my keyboard cover of EFNY. I should probably reupload it to Youtube labelled as a standalone cover. Its tie-in nature with the EP I was promoting at the time has kept views down a bit, I think.
and she’s trapped and there’s no way out of it if she keeps insisting the cab drop her at the harbor to start again.
