Curvature (2017)

The Worst Film Ever

Please don't spend money on this.

Fantastic!

A brilliant film that helped define a genre

As a rule, critics hate everything. And the few exceptions that prove that rule, show conclusively that art's general audience and the art critics are rarely on the same page. This movie is a good case in point. The critics categorically hated it. And lots of viewers who either never knew or forgot the point of what the general public calls sci-fi hated it, too. Unfortunate.It's of note, that within the writing community (and I means books, not screenplays) sci-fi is usually regarded as an insult. For them, it evokes trite stories of little thought, frequently involving large lizards stomping on cardboard towns in Japan. Among serious writers, the term sci-fi has been replaced with s.f., and it's not just a rebranding. s.f., almost always lower case, stands for speculative fiction. The use of the term is intended to remind writers that if a story isn't genuinely speculative, it's probably just sci-fi (meaning crap, usually). s.f. is fundamentally about speculation, not about sets, actors, directors, budgets, or any of the other things that "critics" like to harp on, perhaps just to sound smart. To be sure, those things do matter, just like the production quality of any art does. Just not as much as the speculation.This movie contains two core aspects of speculation, one well-known and frequently used, and the other fairly original. The first, of course, is time travel. And it's used in this story in the usual way, to travel back and change the past. Arguments abound in s.f. and in science about that possibility, as well as the practicality. The second is the use of nested time travel. Though it's appeared in a few stories over the years, it's not common. It's very difficult to plan and plot. Planning is the process of designing what happens and why. Plotting is how you tell the audience what happened and through which character's eyes. One of the interesting things here, though not explained, is the amnesia in the subjects. Without that apparently trivial thing, there would have been no story because she would have known everything in the moment she woke.Think through the plan with me. Wells dies, she finds him. A month later she goes back, as Alex said, and this time, decodes his clue and watch's the video. What's unclear is that if she decides to kill Thomas, why did she need to travel back in time? She could have just killed him in the present. Instead, she protects the video, puts the camera back, buys a rifle and leaves it under her bed. Then she waits several days and sneaks in (somehow) and jumps back a few days, never intending to come back. So did she ever intend to kill Thomas, or just to make her other self *think* she had? Then she hides out giving her other self warnings and clues. What "other self" you ask? You'll see shortly. She waits for her other self to go to Thomas and get taken into the lab. In the confusion she sneaks in again with her bomb to blow up the time machine while her other self watches her from Thomas's office. She jumps back, the machine blows up, and she *becomes* her other self with amnesia in the June 2 wake up scene. A straightforward plan.But the *story* is only of her other self. And it all works, not because of time travel as much as the amnesia. No, wait. The amnesia, as far as we know, happens after you come back. And she never did come back. Or, did she do another jump, in between, *just* to come back and cause the amnesia. Or, perhaps she ...See? Isn't that fun? And speculative, even a bit of science (sort of) thrown in. The real measure of s.f. is how long you keep speculating after you finish the story. And, contrary to the critics, this movie delivers. Are there paradoxes? You bet. Are there mistakes? Yes. And finding those inconsistencies is the other half of the fun.There's plenty here to speculate on here.

Was drawn into seeing 'Curvature' with a cool poster/cover, a very intriguing if not creative premise and as someone with a general appreciation for the genre as said many times. That it was low-budget, which from frequent personal experience is rarely a good sign due to that there are so many poor ones out there, made me though apprehensive. 'Curvature' is a film it doesn't do enough with its potential (although there are far bigger wastes of potential in film) and could have been much better. 'Curvature' is very weak with a lot of big problems. It certainly could have been far worse, considering the large number of films seen recently being mediocre at best and terrible at worst. There is very little to recommend here but it's not completely irredeemable. The best thing about 'Curvature' is the sets/scenery, that look like a lot of care and time went into constructing them. Rather than limited and drab, they have elaborate atmosphere. Music is similarly atmospheric, and avoids being over-bearing or too much of one mood, the sound isn't too cheap either. Despite being criminally underused, considering she is the most well-known cast member, Linda Hamilton tries her best.Rest of the acting however is pretty negligible, with a particularly lifeless performance from Zach Avery while Lynsey Fonesca came over as one note and ill at ease. The whole cast are ill served though by very clichéd and sketchy characterisation and a script that felt incomplete and with a lot of ramble and cheese.Despite the sets impressing, much of the filming doesn't with it being far too obvious that there were budget limitations and that it was made in haste. The editing is sloppy and the camera work didn't seem particularly focused too often, although there are moments of slickness. The story doesn't really get off the ground (the direction likewise) and clarity is not a strong suit, it is not easy to follow at times and it is rife with ridiculousness and implausibility too glaring to ignore. Do have to agree too that the ending is terrible and doesn't make sense.In conclusion, weak. 3/10 Bethany Cox

Without giving away any real spoilers, this is the worst time traveler movie I have ever seen (which is probably the vast majority of them). Even the time-traveling building miniseries was so so much better than this. If this is all they could do with time travel, well, then they definitely do not deserve the tech at all. And good riddance! Do you really want these same folks mucking with the timeline?!

I had to wash out the bad taste in my eyeballs by watching Terminator again. That's okay to a certain extent as I was about due for another viewing of said masterpiece.Although, I like how much the lead actress looked like a younger Linda Hamilton, seeing them act together(though briefly) and the Terminator like music (which was actually better than this movie deserved). Interestingly enough, the fact that Linda was so phenomenal as Sarah and the lead actress in Curvature was so bad shows (to a certain extent) how much good acting has gone downhill in 30 years. If Samuel L Jackson can consistently act great in many bad movies, the lead actress in this can too. And this I found more interesting than the storyline of this movie. I'm surprised this got made at all and attracted the talent that it did.Best acting goes to the dead guy in flashback, followed closely by the ladybug (yes the insect kind).