What was the point again?

Rating: 7/10 (22 April 2006)

Deus ex machina, eh? It's pretty much the staple theme. There's a bit of social commentary, but it's more exaggerated than the 80's I lived through. And it's more social observation than commentary.
I don't see the point. The plot is developed for its own sake. If you try to reduce it to something solid, without the layers of requirements to resolve the tangent universe, it comes down to some book written by Roberta Sparrow.
I agree with the other guy. Why would this film be in the top 100? It's a long winded explanation of what takes most English teachers 10 minutes to spit out. Deus ex machina. But not exactly. It's more like creating a PROBLEM rather than a solution.
Why would this problem exist? Who is Roberta Sparrow? How did she come to write this book? These are the real questions. They're left unanswered of course. And I guess the puzzles are intriguing enough to carry the film. The puzzles were distractions to me, nonsense games that are never quite resolved.
I like the movie well enough. I like it better the more I see it. But it's still just an okay film. Twelve Monkeys is a close relative, much superior. Even The Jacket is better.
This movie cannot possibly stand on its own, which is another problem. Explanations and questions are all over the net, which is both really fascinating and absurd at the same time. You need a fictional book inside a fictional movie to decipher a fictional phenomena with a set of arbitrary fictional rules. Shrug. I like that some explanation reference Ground Hog. That movie, a very distant cousin, was much better as well!