The second and most wonderful way that Arq blunders this already well-explored film concept is by drawing a literal line around its central location and saying, “Okay, everything we’ve been talking about only applies to stuff within this circle.” So, I’m to believe that time itself is looping over and over again within a house and outside the house things are progressing as normal. Which is always what you want to do with your stories.
Then, towards the end, we learned of the potential for them to start forgetting previous attempts, which serves to amplify the confusion of the premise while at once making the story way less meaningful.
This is worsened by the fact that characters start remembering the different days after a different number of trials for reasons that are never explained. One, by allowing more than one character to retain memories, it draws into focus the question of why the memories of previous iterations are retained. Reset all the circumstances except for the protagonist’s knowledge base and the previous iterations might as well have been dreams or practice runs for the finale. This is actually one of the easiest time travel premises to write. Okay, so what you have here is a looped time time-travel storyline with memory retention a la Groundhog Day or Live Die Repeat aka The Edge of Tomorrow aka Full-Metal Bitch aka That Tom Cruise Scif-fi One with the Semi-Robotic Aliens, No Not the One with the Swimming Pool in the Sky and the Clones, The Other One. I give Kyle’s review 5 out of 5, but only for one of the most beautiful sentences ever written – “Hannah, is a freedom-fighting survivalist in a post-apocalyptic world where the air itself is toxic and food is scarce, who, months after being tortured by the mega-corporation that destroyed the world, comes up with the brilliant idea of using her new band of rebels to rob her former boyfriend / experimental energy scientist.”
And each one got the same response, “Shut up, Charlie!” I give ARQ 173 PardoxPoints out of 200. I mean, yes our plucky group of rebels + two mercenary traitors + one ruggedly handsome but bafflingly stupid engineer are stuck for all eternity battling it out inside a very poorly lit concrete bunker pretending to be a home, but at least they have those apples! This movie is great because I am guessing everyone on the cast and crew asked the writer/director (I’m just assuming he’s one guy) “Why didn’t they just do X?” with X being any number of reasonable human behaviors. As far as universe ending paradoxes go, ARQ’s is pretty solid.
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