Plus, any emotion is sucked dry by Taylor's stilted performance. You can still see glimpses of the easy charm he showed off in that flick, but here, he's playing an engineer hiding an energy generator from the corrupt war corporation Torus, his previous employer. Hannah and the perps don't realize they're in Minority Report until Hannah accidentally shoots Renton, starting a loop where they both know they're doing the time warp again.Īmell is most well-known for his stint on The CW's The Flash and last year's surprisingly good teen comedy, The DUFF. When Renton dies, he wakes up in bed again just before the break-in and the scenario repeats and repeats, with Renton learning a little more every time. But really, they could be travel passes or those packets from Spy Kids that turn into Happy Meals. In ARQ's first loop, Renton (played by Robbie Amell) wakes up in bed next to his kind-of-ex Hannah (Rachael Taylor) as three masked men break down their door, tie them up, and demand all his "scrips." (It should be noted that if you were playing a drinking game that mandated a shot for every time someone in this movie said "scrips," you would die of alcohol poisoning.) We're never told what they are, though it's implied they're currency in this reality. But there's something particularly excruciating about watching a bad movie that keeps repeating the same thing every 10 minutes. Watching a bad movie is never an enjoyable experience (with the exception of one that's so bad it's good). In between this, Elliott constantly dangles hints of an interesting future – one where apples are nearly extinct, there are no birds, people need to wear air filter masks, Australia is a radioactive wasteland and corporations dominate the world.What would Groundhog Day be like if it wasn't funny? What if Bill Murray were replaced with a CW star and the entire thing was set in the kind of grim dystopia Jennifer Lawrence would feel right at home in? It would be ARQ, an original Netflix movie premiering September 16 - and it probably shouldn't go on your binge-watch list Although, unlike the others, this film reaches an unresolved ending. Unlike the other films, Elliott uses each repetition to provide a series of twists and turns as Robbie Amell starts to gain new information about the people around him and what is happening that aids him in the next go around. Elliott has fun sketching out the basic scenario and then endlessly repeating it (as all the other timeloop films do). Moreover, the cast is limited to two mildly known tv actors and a handful of heavies. For one, he economically contains the entire film to a single setting – Robbie Amell’s laboratory home (a warehouse location in Toronto) and only once goes outside of three rooms. Tony Elliott does a fairly good variant on what is starting to become an overused theme. Scientist Robbie Amell and girlfriend Rachael Taylor caught in a timeloop For greater detail about Timeloop Films see Timeloop Films. The basic idea has been repeated in a number of other films with the likes of 12:01 (1993), Retroactive (1997), Run Lola Run (1998), Naken (2000), The Last Day of Summer (2007), Repeaters (2010), Source Code (2011), Edge of Tomorrow (2014), Before I Fall (2017), Happy Death Day (2017), Naked (2017), Boss Level (2020), Palm Springs (2020), The Map of Tiny Perfect Things (2021) and Re/Member (2022), even two entire tv series with Day Break (2006-7) and Russian Doll (2019- ). The timeloop film in which the protagonist finds themselves repeating (usually) the same day over and over again with minute variations first appeared in the comedy Groundhog Day (1993), which has become a classic. ARQ premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and appeared soon after on Netflix. Elliott had previously worked as a story editor on Orphan Black (2013-7) – indeed claims that his at that point unproduced script for ARQ is what obtained him the job – and subsequently Hunters (2016), as well as a producer on 12 Monkeys (2015-8) and creator of the short-lived Trickster (2020). ARQ was a directorial debut for Canadian Tony Elliott.
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