![]() Not enough answers and you get the end of Lost. COHERENCE MOVIE TRAILER MOVIEBetter yet, when you do watch the movie again, you’ll find that attention rewarded with deeper understanding of what the hell just happened. As certain twists are revealed, you’ll find yourself reevaluating a line of dialogue, or the position of a piece of scenery, or the color of a pen. Learning about the Millennium Falcon’s hyperdrive is pretty cool, but once we get to the Force being caused by midi-chlorians in the bloodstream, I’m out.ĭirector James Ward Byrkit manages to sprinkle Coherence with enough clues to reward the detail-oriented thread-pulling that makes sci-fi so much fun. Science fiction often falters when the genre’s baked-in impulse for intricately detailed world-building moves from small ideas to big concepts. ![]() Narrative payoff is actually what elevates Coherence from something interesting to something that feels truly special. That’s not to say it’s all mystery and mood and no answers. A relationship on shaky ground becomes a reason to walk into a reality-warping shadow. Existential career disappointment organically gives way to alien paranoia. When a character does something in Coherence, even if that thing is a structurally pedestrian “someone go see what that was” kind of suspense trope, it just flat-out works because the characters are so well drawn. But the burbling naturalness of the dinner conversations in Coherence - people talking over each other, a tone of annoyance hitchhiking onto a sigh, a flash of anger in a glance while washing dishes - establishes a set of personal stakes for each of the characters that’s magnified when shit starts to get super-psychedelic. Like, perhaps some would disagree, but the last thing Guardians of the Galaxy needed was to be more like Frances Ha. Imagine if the characters in Cloverfield never left the party and you’re on the right track.Īdult-malaise relationship drama and dimension-bending science fiction are not genres that spring to mind as being two great tastes that necessarily taste great together. It just looks too fucking awesome to be mysterious.Ĭoherence doesn’t have the budget to show you the giant lizard, so it shows you eight people you might recognize from your own life going, “What the fuck is happening?” The disbelief and confusion of the characters ends up driving the movie. But when the monster appears, smashing buildings and breathing flames in seamless Imax perfection, the last thing I think is how weird and how confusing it would be to experience a giant monster destroying a city. And you can add all the science-guy exposition about nature and the dark depths of the oceans to try to ground Godzilla in something resembling Earth’s reality. You can try limiting the beast’s screen time, à la Jaws, to focus the dramatic punch of its appearance. I’m already suspending my disbelief and holding a chloroform rag over the mouth of my extremely basic knowledge of zoology. When I went to see Godzilla, for instance, I knew I was walking into a movie about a 400-foot-tall, nuclear fire–breathing lizard. One of the inadvertent victims of high-fidelity summer tentpole CGI, especially when it comes to the science fiction genre, is the strange and the weird. ![]() Because while this dinner party is taking place, Miller’s Comet is passing by the Earth, bending the laws of physics in ways the characters can’t understand. ![]() ![]() People, in other words, at a point in their lives where idealism long ago gave way to reality - a point where some of them might be wondering about lives that could’ve been led, if this or that event had shaken out just a bit differently. The “annoyingly always has their shit together” person. The “surprisingly into crystals and feng shui” person. The “I messed up my chance to live my dreams and now I’m pretending everything is fine” person. There’s the “barely sublimated career angst” person. One of the movie’s many miniature triumphs is how perfectly it depicts the social dynamics of a group of friends in their mid-to-late thirties, and how well it takes that kind of wine glass–clinking ennui and warps it into something very, very weird, but very recognizable at the same time. Just watch it.Ĭoherence opens with eight friends at a suburban dinner party - and all the relationship kabuki a setting like that entails. That’s really all I can say - such are the joys of its quantum physics–fueled plot. It is, in fact, a movie about multiplicity. Coherence is a movie you’ll want to see multiple times. ![]()
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