Even Better the Second Time

I just watched this for the second time in four days, and it went from a high 8 to an easy 9. How often does a movie do that?

Like Christopher Nolan's work, the movie gets significantly more emotional once you can attend to the characters and the performances, and don't have to think about following the plot (something virtually every outside reviewer failed to do, BTW).

And here's two great things I picked up:

-- The corrections officer (Arthur Kinnison) lied to Tom and Richard about Anthony's status. They say they "just picked him up," but the newspaper clippings that Abbey has saved say he was convicted five years ago, as much as a year before the experiment went wrong.

-- There's an ultimately unimportant, but really cool, difference between Anthony's false memory of the key night, and what really happened. He "remembers" stumbling into and breaking the table as he entered, but in fact it was his ex-accomplice Eric who did that, and it was that sound that awakened him in the bathtub.

Whenever you make an indie sf movie this smart, you run the risk of having it only seen by reviewers (and festival programmers) not smart enough to understand it. And then people rent it at random, and it goes over too many heads. That's what happened here, initially.

Netflix, though, told me I'd give this a 4.2, based on my love of Gattaca, Europa Report, and Primer, and that prediction proved to be conservative. That demonstrates that people who love smart sf consistently love this. And its reputation will grow.

Prepare your minds for a new scale of physical, scientific values, gentlemen.