![]() ![]() ![]() They start out as unabashed capitalists of the “greed is good” variety and have no qualms about immediately exploiting a newly discovered land for their own enrichment. It is difficult to summon sympathy for the four main characters. The cliché characters, often the most sidelined or quickly eliminated in other movies, become the heroes in this one. It starts with a completely standard set of characters (including Black best friend and token woman), and then switches things up about halfway through. Hell, even Into the Spider-verse did it, and we called that out as being the least innovative aspect of that movie.Īnother way of approaching the film is as a character study, instead of as an exploration of a SF concept. Josh: The idea of searching the multiverse for dead loved ones is also a common trope. You’re going to have to bring something new to the table if you want to play with such an overused concept. Josh: This movie is literally Through the Looking Glass.Īrley: -and parallel universes are everywhere. We’ve all already seen stories about traveling through mirrors. Basically the same audience as Black Mirror, I think.Īrley: Non-SF readers will be dazzled by the concept and the quotes. Josh: Explicitly using the Clarke quote means your audience is rookie science fiction fans. Josh: That scene where the two dudes find a DVD of a movie that doesn’t exist in their universe is straight out of Tim Pratt’s 2007 Hugo Award winning story, “ Impossible Dreams“.Īrley: The characters quoted Clarke and Heinlein, and I was like so… you haven’t read anything new. That setup could allow us to explore interesting issues such as, “What is reality?” or “Can I trust my memories?” or “Is this insanity or a conspiracy?” Instead, it’s used to sideline this character and keep them away from the action. ![]() Unlike LX 2048, this doesn’t make the film feel overstuffed with ideas, but rather hollow and empty as each concept is given only a surface-level examination before moving on to the next “cool idea.”Īs an example, one character is unwittingly drawn into a parallel universe and develops paranoid symptoms arising from the Berenstain Bears version of the Mandela Effect. Parallel‘s production values are good (there’s a visual effect at the climax that is nearly worth the price of admission on its own), but the story suffers from an overabundance of separate story threads, almost none of which further the actual plot or come to a real resolution. The characters in that are just jumping in and out of portals and experiencing time differences and the book doesn’t make any attempt to explain the mechanics, simply focuses on an interesting story. Like The Magician’s Nephew, which is my favorite of the Narnia books. Josh: This is one of the few times I actually wished they would’ve just made it magic. The weird periscope thing, the universes resetting every time they went through the mirror, and the time dilation.Īrley: The time dilation was a problem. Josh: Yeah, there was a lot of hand-waving and unilateral restrictions to the worldbuilding that didn’t seem to serve the plot. They tried to make it science fiction, but the more they tried to explain things, the less sense it made. The rules were a little arbitrary, especially at the very end.Īrley: It’s not a science fiction movie, it’s a fantasy movie. It was entertaining, if not a complete success. Their pursuits of money, power, lust, love, and second chances start to reveal fractures in their friendship and in their morality, and when one of the group dies, the others must decide how far they’ll go to make things normal again. ![]() Eager to capitalize on the nearly unlimited resources of the multiverse, Leena (Georgia King), Noel (Martin Wallström), Devin (Aml Ameen), and Josh (Mark O’Brien) soon devise a number of get-rich-quick schemes, mostly at the expense of their own parallel selves. Four friends living together and working to develop an app discover a hidden room in their house and, in it, a magic mirror that can portal them to different, but nearly indistinguishable, parallel universes. ![]()
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