See, this is what happens when I watch the big movie of the week on a Thursday night: I end up watching something else on a Saturday night after I get through my Stacker Challenge movies for the week and decide to knock something off one of my watchlists. My choice for a Saturday night? The 2009 psychological horror movie Triangle.
That’s a British movie with a cast made up of Australians and New Zealanders who all play Americans in Florida before going off to have problems in the Bermuda Triangle.
Jess (Melissa George) is a single mother struggling to take care of her autistic son. After yelling at her young son one day, she goes off to take a day sailing with friends. The boat hits a storm, one passenger washes overboard, and the survivors find themselves trapped on the overturned boat. However, an ocean liner passes by, and the survivors get onto the boat. But a hooded person shoots most of the survivors save Jess. Distraught, she comes across something she didn’t expect to see: herself and her friends, standing on the overturned boat calling for help. It would seem that she is stuck in a time loop.
From here, Jess just tries to get out of the loop, but her efforts don’t seem to work out that well. For one thing, there may be other Jesses on the ocean liner. For another, no matter what she does, she can’t seem to get out of the loop. It may mean Jess will have to get a bit tougher to get out of this. If anything, the one way out may be to kill the others, start over, and try to keep the lot of them from going sailing in the first place. Maybe.
See, this movie seems like the sort where the time loop doesn’t quite make sense if you think about it too much. To be fair, that’s true to most time travel movies. There’s evidence that the Jess the movie is following isn’t even the first one who came into the loop. Things may or may not reset. There are piles of bodies of the same person. And quite honestly, Jess goes a little bit too quickly to homicide to fix things. Where Jess got the idea that this is the way out of the loop, I have no idea.
And that seems to be how this movie goes. It’s got some stuff there that is in theory kinda cool and all, but it doesn’t hold up well when I think about it a little too much. The reveal at the end involving Jess’s son seems to be something that maybe should have happened before, but the movie doesn’t quite tie itself together the right way to pull that off. Factor in a bunch of bland characters and I have a movie that, for me at least, just didn’t work.
Grade: C
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