Product: Triangle (2009)
Rating: 1.0
Think "the Twilight Zone".
This movie actually turned out to be more entertaining than I had thought it would be. Still, I would advise people to see it on cable or rent it, rather than spend money to buy it. It is not a movie worth seeing a second time.The title of this movie "Triangle" is misleading. Many people (myself included) expected a "Bermuda Triangle" type film, and this it definitely is not. Nor is it strictly speaking a time travel movie. The title reflects the name of the boat that the characters are travelling on, and I think they should have changed the name of the movie to avoid confusion. This movie reminded me of nothing so much as an elongated "twilight zone" episode. During the film, the viewer thinks that it is both, because at first the main characters are ship wrecked by a very creepy and unnatural storm, and then are saved when they board a strangely deserted old luxury ocean liner that cruses past them. One by one they are killed by a mysterious figure, leaving only the main heroine alive. After she stumbles around, in and out of the endless rooms of the ship, she suddenly finds herself looking over the ships rail seeing (amazingly) herself and her friends, standing on their overturned boat----just as they had been several hours before! Obviously, the heroine has somehow jumped backward in time---and maybe has a chance to save everyone, right? Not exactly.We now follow the heroine through a long and convoluted series of actions which she hopes will allow her to escape the ocean liner. It seems as if she is going through a series of time loops----repeating the same series of events again and again, trying to get a different outcome. (rather like the movie Groundhog's Day, but without the wacky comedy) But at the same time, there is chilling evidence that she is not exactly experiencing a time loop---at least not in the way that we are familiar with from science fiction. In several places in the movie, she comes across (impossible) physical evidence that she has done this same thing,taken this same path many, many times. One of these points was when she falls and her necklace drops off and it falls through a grating. When she looks through the grating, she sees, in the compartment below, hundreds of copies of her necklace! I thought that this part was well plotted and very chilling.When the movie was over, basically coming in a full circle to begin again, I was put very much in mind of the old "Twiligh Zone" episodes. Close to the movie's end, we see the heroine after having suffered a terrible car crash. And she is untouched, unharmed, even her hair is not mussed. Even if she has somehow returned back through time, she could not have survived that accident. Is she dead? If so, it is not the common ghost that we usually see in fiction. She seems to be fully flesh and blood. So what is the explanation?Suppose we are not seeing someone trapped in a linear storyline or a time loop? Suppose we are viewing the sufferings of a damned soul in hell? What hell could be worse than to forever relive the most terrible events of your life, trying in vain to change them, over and over and over, forever? That is something worthy of the devil himself!And why would I think that the heroine might be a damned soul? Well, we see reasons for it in her actions during the movie. She puts on an act that she is devoted to her small son, but the fact is she abuses the child both physically and mentally. And gives herself all kinds of excuses for it. And she is selfish in the extreme, showing herself to be fully willing to sacrifice others to save herself or serve her own purpose. Even at the end of the movie, when she finds herself once again at the beginning, ready to set sail with her four friends in the "Triangle", she does nothing to try to stop the series of events. She could refuse to get on the boat, stop her friends from going, sabotage the boat, push everybody off the dock into the water, almost anything. But she doesn't. I know people may say it was because she wanted to take the chance that this time around she could change things, and make her son alive again (her son having been killed in the car crash) but I don't buy that explanation. What about the four other innocent people, supposedly her friends? She shows indifference to their suffering, their dying. She lacks a core of humanity, and again is selfish. She wants her own way, even though it means her friends will suffer and die in order to serve her purpose. Her soul is rotten. And the audience may be privy to her punishment.At any rate, that is my take on this movie, although I do not know if that is what the writers or directors considered. You have to stick with the film, even when it seems to get bogged down, and stay through all the convoluted plotting. It turned out to be a lot more interesting than I had expected. But not something that I would see again or buy.