2017, d. Ry Russo Young - amazonprime
Preamble
[Toasty] Yes, intentionally, I am editing Kent's existing post, to add in some typical rambling on my part. This Loopty Loo project started out as something we were hunting down, but as all of our "Projects" do, it ambled off into... squirrel !! But I have to say, I actually like being surprised by one popping up on the radar."You realize the reader did not see the draft of this, the moment in time when there wasn't a Preamble?"
And yes, I finally got around to seeing this Teen Drama rendition of a Loopty Loo, as Kent put in the stub many weeks ago.
Its a decent example of the trope while actually striving to be slightly different from the norm.
How did the Loop Begin?
[Kent] Sam (Zoey Deutch, The Threesome) wakes up to music playing on her phone at 6:52 AM. Apparently she's been sleeping in? (Why do American kids go to school so early?!?). Her adorable little sister is bouncing on her bed. Sam is annoyed. She gets ready for the day, skips breakfast, gets further frustrated at her little sister, then hops in her friend Lindsay's SUV (Halston Sage, The Orville) and they pick up their other friends Ally (Cynthy Wu, For All Mankind) and Elody (Medalion Rahimi, NCIS: Los Angeles). Today is apparently "Cupid's day" at school, when people (mainly guys) buy roses to signify their affection for someone. (This isn't the first time I've seen this tradition on screen, but is it a real thing? Never at my school).
[Toasty] Geez, these people have money. Usually, in these Pacific North West set movies, when we get "small Vancouver suburbia" setting we see those lovely Queen Anne's and other vintage houses, but this entire neighbourhood seems West Coast Modern all piled on immaculate terraces.
Tangent Note: For about 10 minutes, I thought Cynthy Wu was the actress who played Knives Chau, and then suddenly realized I was a decade off timeline. Also, "Cynthy" ???
[Kent] Today is also the day Sam has decided she's going to go all the way with her boyfriend, the hottest guy in school. He sends her a rose, but she also receives a decidedly different rose from Kent (no, not me; Logan Miller, Escape Room), a boy she's was friends with when they were kids, but hasn't really paid any attention to him in years. (Kent basically looks like Jeff Daniels in Dumb and Dumber and doesn't give off good vibes, but he's, apparently. the true love interest of this teen fable...ick). At lunch, Lindsay leads the girls in a rousing spate of taunting unkempt Juliet (Elena Kampouris, Jupiter's Legacy) who, clearly, is not having a good time in high school. (I mean, I didn't have a good feeling about these girls from the car ride into school, but now I really, really despise them. They're Mean Girls.)
[Toasty] Yes, this is most definitely the clique of Popular Girls, with Sam filling the role of Most Likeable. But like all cliques, even if she has reservations about their behaviour, she piles on anyway. I imagine the setup of them as characters, as I don't watch many of this demographic of film, is that they are simultaneously the "I hate them" and the "I wanna be them" girls?
[Kent] Kent's having a party (still not me), so that's where everyone will be. The girls get dressed up and Sam's nervous about her first time with the hottest guy in school. When they arrive at (not me) Kent's, THGIS is drunk off his ass already and Sam is turned right off. Then Juliet turns up and Lindsay goes full on demon on her. They get into a pushing match before everyone starts ganging up on Juliet and tossing their drinks on her. The night is heated, and, frustrated, the girls leave, only to get into an accident at 12:39 AM.
[Toasty] THGIS... ?? ohhhhh.... yeah. Juliet and Lindsay have some history; she seems to instantly know Lindsay's trigger points. But WHY did she even show up to the party?
[Kent] I had assumed at first that maybe Juliet was Kent's sister and lived there? But then that was quickly disproven. Given what we know about what Juliet is bound to do, she was going there to provoke the mean girls.
[Toasty] Did you hear the "bump" just before they crashed? I wondered if this was going to be a "I Know What You Did Last Summer" vibe, but the Peanut Gallery said a tired popped. Did angry Juliet sabotage their vehicle?
[Kent] I did, and given how the second time loop winds up, I was wondering if, somehow, the loops all kinda looped back on each other, and the "bump" in the first instance was connected to the same "bump" in the second last instance.
[Toasty] I am assuming they all died.
[Kent] Let's hope! Sam wakes up in bed, and today is yesterday again. What'd I miss?
[Toasty] OK, classic setup. Introduce the mains, add in a "pining for love" Nice Guy, and even have a few core "repeatable events": the origami bird on the bed, the bouncing sister, a pile of books fall from the locker, etc. I also love that it begins with an alarm going off and all new Loopty-Loo's will involve the time displayed on someone's phone (as opposed to a red digital clock on the night stand); at least until we get past that paradigm.
What was the main character's first reaction to the Loop?
[Kent] There's a voiceover at the start of the film and sometimes at the start of each loop. Here Sam opines that she's maybe dead already. She's not sure what's going on. The familiarity of the day as is, just waking up to the same song, the same texts, the same little sister jumping on her bed. She's moving slower. Lindsay doesn't meet her in the driveway, she comes to her room. It's the same but it's not. Deja-fucking-vu much? But this time, seeing everything again, she's not participating, she's almost an outside observer, and as sort of freaked out by the same-sameness of it all, she's also kind of in disbelief. She wonders if she just dreamed the prior day, and all the similarities are just...eerie coincidences. But standing as an outside observer to one's own life, they perhaps see things one might not see when they are actively participating.
[Toasty] Was she hung over? She got mid-level drunk the night before. Is this one of the loops where they retain the physical effects of the previous loop? Even if not, she is emotionally spent over that whole party thing, Demon Lindsay, drunk-as-fuck THGIS, etc.
[Kent] Oooh, I like that reasoning. Either one of them, heehee.
WHY did the main character get put into the Loop? Can someone else be brought into the Loop?
[Kent] It's pretty evident that, from the onset, Sam is being a total b-hole and not a good person, but that she has the capacity for change. It's clear THGIS is a terrible boyfriend, and that this Kent kid (still not me, and not even jealous), I guess, is the guy she should be with (I guess?) as well as trying to figure out the Juliet situation. Of course in loop #3, Sam and friends avoid the party, they stay up past the time of the car crash the past two nights, and Sam relaxes. "I did everything right" she says. But the girls are all woken up by text bings at, like, 3am saying Juliet committed suicide. Everyone's upset, and Lindsay is putting up a wall, sloughing off any blame. She's kinda the worst. When Sam wakes up the next morning, back in the loop, we all know it's something to do with Juliet, but it takes Sam a few more tries to figure that out.
[Toasty] Isn't it fascinating that we grew up with Nice Guy fiction, in that we were supposed to identify with the awkward, nice kid who was "supposed to get" the female protagonist BUT that code has been flipped on its head so much so that we cannot HELP but expect him to turn out to be some sort of incel fuckhead? I mean, we weren't ALL incel fuckheads, were we? Not All Nice Guys?
[Kent] There's been some interesting reassessments of Xander from Buffy in this regard (especially as Joss' avatar in the show)...but I/we digress....
[Toasty] Of note, all those wee hours of the morning bings. HOW did all these high school kids learn of Juliet's death so quickly, and if they were all partying, how did one get out to the highway to witness it? Talk about Doom Scrolling...
[Kent] The highway seemed to be an access point to Kent's house, so someone must have driven by and saw what's up....
[Toasty] And, assuming Juliet went to the party to confront her tormentors, primarily Lindsay, and they weren't at the party, what triggered Juliet this time?
[Kent] I really think she was already long triggered, and that going to the party was maybe the last gasp at trying to find some reason no to, to find someone or something to convince her not to (and even then, as we see, someone does try and she's still already got her mind made up).
[Toasty] But, to address the question. Was it as simple as the car crash and her subsequent death led the loop to begin? The usual "Groundhog Day" educational punishment but an unseen and unknown force? Or, was she dead. She died in the crash, and this is her Purgatory. Sam has to stay there, living that same fateful night over and over until.... she learns something? And this being her purgatory, nobody else can become involved. Buuut for the briefest of moments, I thought Juliet might actually be in her own loop, explaining the craziness. And the only way to get out of the loop was to pass it on.
[Kent] Ugh. Why this time loop actually happens... what forces are at play? Deus Ex Machina, plain and simple. It happens because it has to happen otherwise there's no story. There's no logical in-world explanation. Points for trying to concoct something tho *wink*
How long is this time Loop? What resets it? Can you force the reset?
[Kent] The loop starts at 6:52 am, and ends...whenever Sam dies or falls asleep...except that, breaking with the convention of the time loop genre, she does fall asleep about 1am and then is woken up a few hours later with the news of Juliet's death, and then falls asleep again waking up back in the loop. I don't know how that works! Sam never does try to force a reset though.
[Toasty] I liked to think the loop was exactly 24 hrs long. If she's dead, she doesn't experience the remaining hours. If she sleeps, she would sleep through to the next loop-back. If she stayed awake, she would just find herself in bed, in the blink of an eye.
[Kent] I like it. Change approved!
How long does the main character stay in the Loop? Does it have any affect on them, their personality, their outlook?
[Kent] I think I counted about 9 loops in total. There's the first loop which is most the same as the day before, the second loop where they avoid the "big thing" then a montage of loops where Sam just can't cope with being in a time loop, and completely disconnects from everyone and everything, of which I count 3 unique loops intoned there. There's the loop where, per convention, Sam goes full "scorched earth" and dresses in her baddest bad-girl outfit, burns her friendships to the ground and has awful rage sex with THGIS and winds up having a nice(/creepy?) heart to heart with her old friend Kent (still not me) before falling asleep in his bed. The seventh loop she bunks off school for the day and spends the day with her little sister, and then has a dinner out with her family, reconnecting with them. The eight loop she starts to see that changes need to be made, that Juliet is in crisis and nobody else is noticing, but it doesn't end well. It's the ninth loop where she knows exactly what she needs to do, and how to make the perfect day.
There is a conversation Sam has with her mom, asking her mom if she think's Sam's a good person. Anyone who asks that usually wants to do good but are aware that they've been caught in a loop of selfishness but maybe don't know how to get out of it. They might be capable of being a good person, but they're not currently a good person. The time loop, yes, it changes her personality, and she becomes a "good person" (I guess, she still seems kind of selfish in this final loop, frankly, especially that mindfuck she pulls on Kent).
[Toasty] Based on all her voice overs, I liked to think there were countless (COUNTLESS !!) other loops we didn't get to experience, thus her commentary on thousands of hours. She talks about doing good for the sake of doing good, of doing it for others because that is what matters. This movie definitely did not want to nerd out over Time Loops, so it did not have her perfecting the loop -- no wiping up of the nail polish, no finding the exact amount of time to squeeze in a BDay dinner with her parents, no perfect amount of sister bonding... in fact, it kind of abandons all of that in the final loop. She just ... focuses on Juliet.
[Kent] I didn't catch that VO line of dialogue, but there is nothing in what happens in the subsequent loops that even remotely indicates that she's been through dozens or hundreds of loops. I only trust what I see with this one. Even the montage seems concretely like three distinct loops, as opposed to so many Loopty Loos which have montages that convey the fact that someone is stuck in their loop a very long time.
What about the other people in the Loop? Are they aware? Can they become aware? Does anything happen if they become aware?
[Kent] Nobody ever learns that Sam is in a time loop, she never shares it with anyone. We also never really learn what causes the time loop. Kent makes a crack about some experiment gone wrong when he's late to class the first day, but it's not highlighted and there's no way a high school kid is doing that level of experiments to fracture space-time.
[Toasty] I guess it would have just been too cliche to have her share it with Kent and the nerding-out elements of other loopties are an aspect I don't think the demographic for this movie would appreciate. It would have been nice if she had confided with Anna (the "bull dyke"; Liv Hewson, "Dramaworld") about something more than boots.
[Kent] Oh yeah, the Shannon Purser Liv Hewson cameo. I thought it was a good moment in the film, actually, but also felt like a nothingburger in the grander scheme?
What does the main character think about the other people in the Loop? Are they real? Do they matter?
[Kent] It's a rollercoaster of a ride for Sam. She has one day where basically everyone can fuck right off but after that she realizes that she needs to connect with the people she loves more, rather than push them away. So inevitably they matter more, not less as the loop crescendos.
[Toasty] As there is no real "deep thought" about being caught in a time loop, there is no metaphysical thoughts in Sam's head about what is real and who is not real. This is all real to her, everyone is real, even when she is being a bitch to them. The "lashing out" loop was out of character for her.
Most memorable event in a Loop? Most surprising event during a Loop?
[Kent] This is a YA novel adaptation and, as such, its so utterly bogged down in heightened teen emotions, and everything largely revolves around these big feelings that, by the story's own admission, are just a blip and won't mean much to these people a year or two down the road. High school is a Petri dish of hormones and selfishness, it's a wonder any of us survive it. The best parts of the loop are Sam connecting with her kid sister. Just a genuine, meaning, lasting sweetness.
The most surprising was the fact that Sam fell asleep and then was woken up by texts hours later and the loop hadn't reset yet. Mindblowing deviation from convention. Were you as surprised by this as I was, Toasty?
[Toasty] I was surprised. But not overly so; it just had to reset my idea that the loop might have been contained to Juliet's final day in a more tangible way... i.e. it resets on her death. This showed otherwise. I guess the biggest surprise was that Sam sought out a way to end the loop by "saving someone else's life" so very early in the series. Of course, being a selfish teen, she didn't realize that the catalyst at the party was not the only reason Juliet would seek to take her own life. Can you have Main Character Syndrome even if you are the Main Character?
For me, the loop that stood out was when she told Kent she loved him. Yes, I realize this was the source material's attempt to show that after a long long long series of loops where she reconnects with Kent and begins to care for him, but for me, it still felt out of the blue. I get the "I just [re]met you but I love you" aspect of teenagers, but that confession seems... odd.
How does this stack up in the subgenre?
[Kent] One of my least favourites, because it's basically not interested in the time loop at all. Sam has zero curiosity about it, why it may be happening, what it means, what could have caused it. She inherently knows that there's a code to crack, a right answer to get out of this escape room, and it seems from the voiceover she provides that she knows it's only ever going to end one way. And that ending is the biggest fart of the movie. Just that sort of a stinky poo-poo "ain't I so clever and important and meaningful" kind of finale that writers write because they think so highly of themselves and think their story that's nominally about teen suicide is going to matter.
The movie is a decent production, generally, but clearly meant for teenage girls, not 50-year-old men. A central message of learning kindness and empathy and connection is not a bad one. What'd you think Toasty?
[Toast] Yup. Wrong demographic fer shure. I liked and didn't like the ending. In my mind of "this being purgatory" it was fine and dandy -- after figgering things out, she gets to Move On. But in the loopty convention of "learn a bunch of stuff, live life as a better person" it diminishes everything done. This is only about Sam, not about the other people. Sam gets her reward, and sure Juliet lives, but no one else really is bettered for what Sam learned. Part of me likens this to the mind of a vacuous teenage girl, in that she doesn't have any inherent curiosity into her situation. She is only "oh woe is me, how do I get out of this?" which is not absent from "Groundhog Day" either -- only after the convention of loopties established itself, did people start wondering why. We never do understand why Phil is there, nor what or who created it. Maybe its time we (re)watched and wrote that one up, so we can explore how it, the originator, stacks up against its progeny.
And yes, its a very pretty movie with very pretty people, likening to "Twilight" but with time loop tropes instead of vampire tropes.
