Tuesday 15 December 2020

Palm Springs (2020) - Movie Review


Oh dear, it’s another time loop movie. And I’ve already used up basically every remotely useful way I can introduce these movies; I can’t even go full meta and acknowledge this constant stream of time loop movies itself feels like I’m stuck in a time loop, because I’ve already done that too. These past six years since Edge Of Tomorrow has seen a lot of filmmakers try their hand at this, with both good and bad results, but quite frankly, I’m just tired of it all. It’s been done. The chances of something coming along that can add a fresh spin to the idea is growing thinner by the day. It's part of the reason why I wasn't exactly looking forward to this, regardless of how it turns out... and yet it's also the reason why this is such a blast of fresh air.

Right from the start, it cuts the crap about its place within the sub-genre and its modern prevalence. It knows that the audience has seen this done many times before, so it doesn’t try and lead the audience into it. Instead, it presents Andy Samberg’s Nyles as more than familiar with reliving this one day, swanning around the wedding reception like he’s got every single person’s movements mapped out through the repetition. There is still an entry point for the audience in Cristin Milioti’s Sarah, who starts as an outsider who accidentally gets herself stuck in the same loop, but rather than the story being about the time loop as a vehicle for some other kind of narrative, most of the themes spring out of the time loop itself.

There’s some definite Rick & Morty brand nihilism here, with Nyles’ view that since death means nothing, life itself means nothing within this loop, so he’s just learnt to deal with this prolonged existence. As played-out as time loops are getting these days, this specific perspective of trying to live life in spite of the crushing monotony of it all… welcome to life under lockdown in 2020. There’s also how being able to share it with someone else can make it more bearable, as while life may not have much meaning, pain does. Whether you’re experiencing it yourself or inflicting it on someone else, it sticks in the mind, and as fun as it can be to just let loose, something tells me that potentially spending decades doing just that to the same select group over and over would leave one rather empty.

Now, with my own philosophical perspective being largely influenced by films like The Big Lebowski (which itself wagged its fingers at nihilism), I admit that I don’t hold much stock in the idea that life is inherently meaningless. Oh, don’t get me wrong, life doesn’t really have an intrinsic, one-size-fits-all meaning to it beyond just perpetuating its own existence in this plane, but that doesn’t mean it has no meaning whatsoever. To quote Viktor Frankl: “The meaning of life is to give life meaning.” We give life its meaning, each and every one of us. Whether it’s love, work, happiness, spirituality, finding your favourite kind of ice cream; what we do with the life we have is what gives it its meaning.

And for Nyles, after presumed decades of this singular day on repeat, life doesn’t mean much of anything. He’s going through a crisis neverending, and there’s only two others who know what that feels like: Sarah, who ends up taking the quantum physics route to try and figure what the hell is going on, and Roy (J. K. Simmons), another outsider who found their way into the loop that sees Nyles as the reason he’s stuck here, and has all the time in the world to express how that makes him feel, usually with a bow and arrow or possibly a car battery. And both of them get sick of Nyles after a while, finding their own ways to make the most out of this surreal situation.

It’s a time loop movie all about the tedium of the loop, that itself makes for refreshing commentary on the incessant existence of its own sub-genre, plumbing its depths to unearth one of the more learned treatises on nihilism I’ve seen in quite a while. It treats the tropes of the genre (like the inevitable moment when Nyles and Sarah hook up) with a literal “Let’s just get it over with”, and rather than making its own existence moot, it uses that to look at the inherent freedom, and confinement, that a life on repeat offers. And it’s only when Nyles realises that there are risks worth taking to break away from that safety net of routine, that he discovers what life really means to him.

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