BEFORE: Now comes the toughest part of a vacation, which is trying to get back into a normal routine. It's amazing what can happen in five days, you can go to another city and take up residence in a hotel and after maybe two or three days, you've settled into your new circumstances where you get up early for hotel breakfast (or Waffle House, in our case, because hotel breakfast sucked) and you go out and do something fun in the late morning, visit family in the early afternoon, treat yourself to a nice restaurant dinner, and then maybe watch a TV show or play some phone games while you relax. Several of these things might be impossible to do at home during a normal two-job workday, so really it was a five-day break from reality, and a lot of time spent with people that I love/tolerate, but now it's back to the grind where I'm always running behind, always racing to show up somewhere, always balancing a spreadsheet or entering a film festival or resetting a movie theater.
I think maybe things might slow down a bit in November/December, at least on the watching movies front, I only have to watch 13 movies before Thanksgiving and then only 7 before Christmas. Easy peasy lemon squeezy, should be some free time to catch up on other things. Can we please have new TV episodes of something on the air by then? Just asking. Bokeem Woodbine carries over from "Ghostbusters: Afterlife".
THE PLOT: A Philadelphia police officer struggles with a lifelong obsession to track down a mysterious serial killer whose crimes defy explanation.
AFTER: Standard SPOILER ALERT applies, there's simply no way to talk about today's film without, well, talking about today's film and what it entails. Of course, I placed it here in the Shocktober chain because it's about a serial killer, and those are allowed in this month thematically, even though they're kind of on a different level from ghosts and witches and Creepers and monsters. But they ARE monsters, of a sort, anyway, so they're right here along for the ride, unless of course I need those films somewhere else for linking purposes. Lizzie Borden was in last year's horror chain, so naturally I was thinking along the same lines here.
Ah, but there's a twist here, because the policeman who first notices the pattern of the serial killer here is determined to catch her, only when he comes in contact with her she seems to know intimate details about his life, and usually that would just be because the killer is stalking him or has done their research, but that's not the case here. Then the serial killer dies in an accident, but then nine years later there are people being killed in exactly the same way. Normally this would mean there's a copycat at work, but that's not the case here either. Somehow the killer died nine years previously and then is killing again, so right there, it means there's some other force at work here. It could be supernatural or it could be the other thing, and here, well, it's the other thing. You can probably figure it out if you notice that things tend to work chronologically differently for the killer.
Then this really is a take on changing history, the thing that most people would like to change seems to be to take Hitler out if they could, but do we know for certain that if you could erase Hitler from history that things would be any better? They'd be different, sure, but would they be for sure better? It's tough to say - maybe somebody already took Hitler out and then realized that didn't make things better, and if that made things worse, then maybe they changed things again and put Hitler back. Or the simpler answer is probably that time travel isn't possible, and therefore there's no point in even discussing what one would do with it if they could.
But of course there's a paradox involved, I've discussed it here many times, that if you could go back and take out Hitler then you've done something, however then you've eliminated in the past the need for you to take that action in the future, so assuming that you could do it, and then that you did do it, you also changed the timeline and eliminated the need for you to do it, so therefore in the new timeline you didn't/won't do it, so then it didn't get done and then maybe nothing changed after all, and we're back where we started. This film, to its credit, tried to eliminate this paradox by having the traveler inject their victims with a special substance that could be activated by someone in the future, thus killing them remotely, and the effects of removing those people from the timeline wouldn't change the present or the near future, but it would ultimately change the far future events that were brought about by those people, in a roundabout way. Does this make sense?
I'm still being coy here, because I don't want to give it all away, especially if you're going to go watch this movie at some point in the future, some surprises should still be revealed upon watching it, ideally. But let's say that a political party you didn't like took control of the U.S. government, like, say, the Communists or QAnon. You could then invent time travel, and go back in various increments and kill some of the key people in that movement, and thus enact some kind of social change, that's kind of the thing we're dealing with in this movie, however when you don't know the motives of the killer yet, it just LOOKS like standard serial killer stuff, but actually it's being done with a purpose, which would make sense if all those people being killed were all involved with that particular political party or organization. But perhaps a better way to enact societal change would be to get a lot of people you agree with to register to vote. Just saying.
There's still, however, the paradox about technology. One character here decides he's going to invent some of the technology that he saw the serial killer using in the past. Assuming he successfully invents that, though, does that really count as an invention if he's just basing his breakthrough on something he already saw? Then who, in fact invented it, and when, if this guy got a sneak peek in the past at something he might invent later on, in the future?
So ultimately this just made we want to go back and watch "Tenet" again. Maybe I will do that in November. I'm sure I'll see some things I missed the first time around when I watch it a second time.
Also starring Boyd Holbrook (last seen in "Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny"), Michael C. Hall (last seen in "Gamer"), Cleopatra Coleman, Rudi Dharmalingam (last seen in "Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them"), Al Maini, Quincy Kirkwood, Sarah Dugdale, Rachel Keller (last seen in "A Man Called Otto"), Ryan Allen, Tony Nappo (last seen in "Born to Be Blue"), Philippa Domville, Tony Craig, Gabrielle Graham (last seen in "On the Basis of Sex"), Julia Knope, Nicholas Van Burek, Murray Farrow (last seen in "Miss Sloane"), David Macinnis, Stuart Dowling, Jennifer Graham, Gregory Miller, Colton Royce, Billy Otis, Trisha Blair, Delphine Roussel, Juan Carlos Velis (last seen in "Downsizing"), Jhonattan Adrilla, Tadhg McMahon, Edward Rendell.
RATING: 6 out of 10 basketball games on the radio
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