3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Site

2025, Jason Eric Perlman (Threshold) -- download

I would have plugged this into the most recent "31 Days of Halloween" but, a) its been too long hence to insert posts into a chronological stream that is so deep in the past, and b) it wasn't very horror, more scifi thriller. It had horrific elements but its an example of how just tone and intent can change a plot from one genre to another. The poster wanted to imply horror, the creator did not.

On that note, I am listening to audiobook of Joe Hill's "King Sorrow" about college students who accidentally summon a malevolent dragon spirit and thought, "This is a horror book but you could do a fun contemporary fantasy adventure novel about an ancient dragon slayer who gets resurrected every time a dragon reappears in the world." How about it, Joe?

Family drama. Do plots exist without them? Are they the rote framework that people write dramatic fiction on? Would a scifi thriller exist if the main character had a happy home life, liked his job and had a good social life absent of toxic people? Or would people just see that as farcical, for who doesn't have something going on? I know a lot of people who have utterly bland mundane lives sans any drama.

Anywayz, so we have recently separated Neil Bardo (Jake McLaughlin, Will Trent), cuz of a drunk driving accident that he won't accept full accountability for. He works as a site surveyor for recently divorced Garrison Vey (Theo Rossi, The Penguin) who plays at understanding accountability but really, blames everything on everyone else. Garrison has a lucrative potential job turning an abandoned government facility into a new school -- basically loot the thing for anything worth selling, plow it all under and build a school. That is, if there aren't any pollutants that could quash the deal. So, Neil and Bardo survey the massive site on their own, poking around in the offices, and find an unmapped sub-basement with a classic scifi particle accelerator at one end of a long tunnel.

Like most of these movies, the physical setting depicted vs the plot-based setting don't usually match up. The structure appears from the outside as a massive warehouse compound, which the pair could not have quickly surveyed on their own and which they also seem to bypass entirely. The two end up focusing on abandoned office buildings, and the strange lab beneath. So, what was the above used for? Just an empty cover so the weird science being done below could be ignored? Also, if an illicit scientific experiment, that had unforeseen dark consequences, had happened in the building, I doubt the government would allow it to end up on the market. But I guess they needed a reason to have grown adults blunder into it, outside of the usual "curious teens jump the fence on a dare" idea.

Anywayz, Bardo turned on the power so he could see what he was surveying and that activates the weird science thing. Almost instantly he is given visions of the past, of a Chinese internment camp during the Japanese occupation of Manchuria in the late 30s. He also loses time. Garrison is pissed.

The visions / hallucinations continue. Things degrade. The sale is in jeopardy, during one of his hallucinations, his kid is injured so badly, the boy might lose his eyes if surgery doesn't happen immediately and they are in no place to afford it - the tension between Bardo and his wife Elena (Arielle Kebbel, Midnight, Texas) is increased exponentially. But its not just Bardo having them, but also Garrison, though he won't admit it to anyone. And when Bardo's college friends show up, friends with baggage pertaining to Bardo's behaviour in college, Bardo's ex Naomi (Miki Ishikawa, The Terror) starts experiencing the hallucinations as well, as he exposes her to show others he is not insane. It just makes things worse for all, baggage opened again, drama between all being enhanced.

This all boils down to those exposed to the device, flashing back into the histories of those in the internment camp. The experiment was one with the pseudo-science catch phrase of "entanglement" which in this case implies particles which make up people are tied together, forward and backwards in  time. The visions can reflect the kind of people they are, or can be. Bardo is not the hero of the situation, but the "evil" camp director, and the "two" are influencing each other through time. Bardo makes a decision in our time, which changes history in their time, allowing the focal point family to escape, changing historical fact of "nobody escaped Unit 731" to "a single family did". Bardo had to accept that he has perpetually made terrible decisions, and in that understanding, make a choice that is not about him, but for the benefit of his family. In turn, it influences the chief scientist in the original experiment, in the 70s, to change his own choice, creating a paradox -- if the experiment was never completed, how did Bardo change his mind? All of it never happens in the first place; well except for Unit 731 in Manchuria, which was still a horrible event in actual real world history.

I do like pseudo-science quantum / entanglement scifi stories and this was a decent example, marred by, in my opinion of course, heavy handed family drama. I do understand that human emotional conflict is core to story telling but I do tire of the constant people-making-bad-decisions of American story telling.