Aporia

15

Another in my weird foray into low-budget sci-fi dramas that I know aren’t going to be that awesome. Though, that doesn’t mean they can’t be awesome. It’s just a hit-or-miss endeavor. Thing is, they can go one of two ways. They can be harder sci-fi like a Primer. Or a barely-science movie that uses genre to drive the narrative. Like Aporia. Because this — not unlike another recent entry in this run, Things Will Be Different — doesn’t even bother to try to explain the science behind the fiction. I mean, they nod toward it and have one of the characters spout a few lines of science-sounding gobbledygook that would definitely make a real physicist laugh his ass off. Or, more likely, screw his face up and wonder why the hell the writer even bothered. Frankly, the whole thing is complete nonsense, but beyond the lack of comprehensive science, the filmmaker seemed to just chuck any and all logic and continuity into the bin. Which is unforgivable. Though, that doesn’t mean it wasn’t completely without merit. Despite the following complaint fest.

Okay, get ready, I’m about to unleash a bit on why a movie that conceptually could have been cool unraveled its own concept by creating unreliable and inconsistent rules in its own created universe. I know I harp on this all the time when a movie involves some sort of time travel, multi-verse or time-bending-adjacent functionality as a core to its plot, but all I ask for is that the rules the writer creates remain the same for the movie’s runtime. I don’t think that’s a big ask. I’m fine with the fact here that the science is super-dodgy and completely under-explained, but at least keep the superficial setup the same throughout. But here’s the setup, for what it’s worth. Sophie (Judy Greer) is a recent widow raising her teen daughter, Riley (Faithe Herman). Her husband, Malcolm (Edi Gathegi), was killed by a drunk driver eight months before the start of the movie. Malcolm was an out-of-work engineer, I believe. And his best friend was a physicist named Jabir (Payman Maadi). And together they had been building a time machine to go back in time to stop Jabir’s family from dying at the hands of political violence in what I have to assume is Iran. It seems building a time machine isn’t that easy. But, apparently, instead of a time machine they managed to build something that could send a subatomic particle to a specific location and time in the past that will maybe, sorta scramble the brain of the person at those coordinates and kill them. What a useful machine! And also a vague one that, even in the brief explanation of it, makes no fucking sense.

So, of course, Sophie and Jabir — both of whom are struggling with the loss of Malcolm — connect and decide that the drunk driver should die in the past in order to possibly bring Malcolm back from the dead. So, they find an image of him on the Internet from the past standing in a recognizable location, somehow extract the exact coordinates of where he’s standing, input the stuff in a 1987-looking computer and the machine that looks like a HEMI engine from my 2006 Dodge Durango that’s sitting in Jabari’s spare room puffs some smoke and the dude is dead. Never mind the fact that the drunk driver dude is standing next to several other dudes in the photo and they never explain how they can aim this “particle” in such a precise fashion. But, you know, whatever. And voila, Malcolm is back! And you say… Yes, for some unexplained reason, the people in the room with the machine don’t experience the world as it becomes between the time of the particle killing the dude and the present moment. They retain the old timeline, whereas the rest of the world only knows the timeline created by the butterfly effect of the person getting hit with the particle. Don’t ask. But, thank god, Malcolm is back because the relationship between Sophie and her teen daughter was super-odd and confusing. It’s the first thing we’re introduced to in the film and it almost seems like Sophie barely knows her. As if she’s not really her daughter, or is possibly a step-daughter. Granted, Riley is apparently bi-racial (basically she doesn’t perfectly resemble her super-white mom), so they inject that doubt prior to us meeting Malcolm. But, essentially, it seems that the daughter and Malcolm are just bonded in their interesest and Sophie is on the outside. Which might explain why Sophie has no idea about Jabir’s family’s story — despite him being her husband’s best friend. You’d think she’d know about that if she ever talked to her husband. Curious.

I think I was so focused on trying to figure out what was going on that I didn’t notice Malcolm only has one arm. I thought that would be a whole Chekhov’s prosthetic and it would somehow come back in one of our butterfly effect things, but maybe it was just a way to explain why he didn’t have a job (having lost the arm to a job-related accident). Thing is, Sophie is feeling a little guilty after murdering a dude with Jabir’s HEMI engine. So she mysteriously tracks down Kara (Whitney Morgan Cox), the widow of the dude — impossibly finding her with no logical way to find her — and figures out her husband dying made her destitute and toting around a daughter the same age as Riley with MS. First, I wasn’t aware young teens can have MS, but the Internet explains that, while rare, it is a thing. Thing is, she needs surgery at some point, which the Internet does not support as a thing. Surgery for MS? Anyway, this all leads to a truly weird and stupid decision to use the machine again to help Kara out. Kara, whom her daughter calls by her first name for some reason despite the script telling us she is indeed Kara’s biological daughter and not the drunk driver’s. Which I imagine was written that way to alleviate some of the trauma of the daughter losing her father and not just her step-dad. But it seems, based on this quirk of naming, that the writers either changed this up during filming or screwed up whose bio daughter the girl is.

And now you’re wondering why these people are messing around with this history-changing device to use on random widows and not, say, killing Hitler. Or, you know, getting around to that whole saving Jabir’s family thing? Well, the machine is only powerful enough to go back like five years. So, while Jabir argues they should at least use it to stop mass murders that have happened in the recent past, Sophie somehow holds sway over him (and eventually Malcolm) that they shouldn’t do this for some reason. He does indeed use it to kill at least one mass murderer without telling the other two, but it doesn’t seem to have any effect on things other than saving the people directly effected in the murders. Now, how did he get a day and exact location of where this murderer was going to randomly be? Oh, yeah… that whole rule. We can just ignore that one now. Yet, it seems that Jabir has been working behind the scenes, collecting trash from scrap trucks, making the machine more powerful so it can go back further. Science, yada yada.

But, no, they don’t hold out to kill Hitler. Or Stalin. Or Pol Pot or Baby Doc Duvalier. Or even Timothy McVeigh. Nah, they go after the Bernie Madoff of Arizona. The who? Yes, some guy who ripped off Kara back in the day, causing her bakery dreams go up in smoke. You know, that always-lucrative, big-money bakery business. I mean, it’s absurd. Once again, they zap a dude with no location or coordinates, but I guess that’s just a chuck-it at this point. Also… and this is the one that broke me. This murder causes a butterfly effect that makes zero sense. Zero. Granted, it could have been explained away with two sentences, but there was no thought. I’m going to spoil this here, but by killing this random dude, Sophie and Malcolm’s daughter Riley turns into their son Riley. Now, this would have required them to have gone back before Riley was born to kill this Madoff-like guy. Riley is, say, fourteen. The machine at this point can only go back five or so years — or let’s even give it ten if Jabir has made some upgrades. We are at no point told how far back they had to reach to kill this Madoff-like guy in order for him to not rip off Kara to ruin her bakery business, but we weren’t given an indication it was that far back. So, if they only went back, say, ten years, daughter Riley would have already been born a girl and… well, the butterfly effect only works from when the butterfly flaps its wings forward. So Riley couldn’t have changed sexes if her sex was already determined and she was already a living human being. That’s not how time works. Thing is both Sophie and Malcolm were in the room with the machine, so they didn’t live the life raising their son Riley and, when confronted with the gender-bender, are messed up because of it.

Now… because they’re messed up and Jabir apparently then tweaks the machine enough to go back to save his family somehow, they all decide that he should do that and they should suffer the consequences of the reset. The reset being that if he saves his family, he would have never moved to the US and invented this machine to begin with. Now, if he’s in the room with the machine and zaps whomever in the past killed his family (where we, once again, just ignore the whole needing to know the time and place thing), wouldn’t he still be left in the room with the machine? If we’re sticking to the rules? The answer is yes. So both he and the machine still exist in this new timeline with the working machine and all the knowledge of how it works. But the conundrum here is that if the thing resets, Malcolm may end up dead at the hands of the drunk driver again. And this big decision is made the crux of the tension. But… do we not remember that he was killed visiting Jabir? Der, people. He’s not going to die because he’s not going to be in that spot where he was because Jabir won’t be there and he won’t even know who Jabir is. With all that, we’re left on a cliffhanger shot of Sophie walking into the house, left to determine based on the look on Sophie’s face if Malcolm is indeed alive. An ambiguity the filmmaker seemed to want. But logic tells us he is alive — even if the filmmaker doesn’t realize their own reveal. Which it seems they don’t. This is what kills me here. I liked the idea. The ethical questions that come up. The family-at-center thing. Even some of the mechanics of this dumb machine could have been interesting if they just kept it consistent and explained it a little more. I obviously found it interesting enough to write this much shit about it, but I just wish someone would have taken an extra writing pass at it and corrected some of the major plot holes, tightened up the dialogue and generally upped this thing’s game an extra 40%.