Triangle 2009
Dir: Christopher Smith
Rated: R
I had a migraine by the time the end credits of this particular movie started. Because I felt like I'd been brained with the Confuse-O-Stick® and left to deal with what everything might mean in the consequences of the actions Jess (Melissa George) perpetrates. So this one's going to be shorter than usual. It starts off in a confusing place. I'd be more detailed about it all, but I'm still trying to patch the ragged quilt of plot together. It's not out of sequence in the way that Pulp Fiction was—where everything comes full circle and makes sense at the end. Everything does come full circle, but it still makes no sense.
Long story short, Jess is taking a boat trip with her friend Greg on a Saturday morning. She's preparing to leave and presumably takes her autistic son, Tommy, to school so he can be looked after while she's gone. But when she arrives at the dock, Greg can tell something is off with her because Jess looks incredibly confused. His other friends (Sally, Downey, Heather, and deckhand Victor) can't ignore her odd behavior and the girls rudely whisper like high school gossip hounds on the stern of the boat. At this point, even though I'm confused by Jess, I already really don't like Sally. I might have liked Heather if she'd spent more time in the movie. But that's giving away a plot point.
This is kind of like how I ended up looking by the end of this movie... Tired and confused.
They sail out until the wind just up and dies on them, and like in any good "scary" movie our heroes are headed right for a huge storm while stuck out in the middle of nowhere. Sure, they try calling the coast guard, but see it's an electrical storm so the radio is all messed up. Greg does get a hold of someone for a second who sounds distressed, but the storm capsizes the boat and Heather is missing when they all climb on the wreck and try to think about what to do next.
My question is: What was the point of Heather in the first place? I felt no emotional connection to her at all. She's a stranger to me and to Jess and Sally's frantic shrieking about her just makes me feel less. Because I do not like Sally. Sally needs to shut the hell up.
So they finally see this cruise ship heading toward them and climb on board when they see someone peek over the side on the upper deck. Jess keeps mentioning that she can't shake the feeling that she's been there before and everyone else doesn't believe her. She hears things in stereo at one point, finds her car keys on the floor, and they all split up once they reach the dining hall to see if they can find anyone to help them.
Since when is splitting up ever a good idea in these kind of movies?
Jess ends up on her own after a bit of an argument with Greg and, thanks to a mirror with "GO TO THE THEATER" written on it in blood, Jess eventually makes her way there. But not before an injured Victor tries to strangle her and she accidentally kills him when she shoves him away from her. Jess then runs to the theater and finds Sally and Downey screaming over Greg's body—saying she shot him and generally shrieking a lot. Both get shot by a masked figure and Jess runs.
She eventually fights the figure off and it warns her, muffled through the Scarecrow mask, that she needs to kill everyone to leave. Jess isn't having any of this nonsense and, after wresting the shotgun away, shoots this person and then watches as he/she falls overboard.
Then Jess sees the boat. The capsized boat she'd just been trapped on a few hours earlier. This means it was her that they'd all seen lean over the railing.
And so the infinite loop begins. Jess has to dodge her duplicate and find a way off the damn cruise ship. It just so happens that Scarecrow up there was right. Jess does have to kill all of these people to get back home to her son. So she dons the boiler suit, puts on the mask, and picks up the shotgun.
There are some really disturbing visuals of the piled-up bodies of Sally copies that just make me feel even more confused than I already was. Eventually, Jess reaches the point in the time loop where her "first" encounter with herself occurred. She lands in the ocean and wakes up on the beach back home.
I am still really confused.
Jess gets back home and, disturbingly, she overhears herself screaming at Tommy. Apparently she either blocked this from her memory or it's just another plot hole. In any case, Jess sneaks into her house and kills herself. In front of her son who, naturally, freaks out.
Is it considered "suicide" if you stuff your own body in the trunk and happen to be alive to do that?
Whatever. At this point I was glaring at the screen.
So after Mommy Dearest whacks herself and stashes the dead body in the trunk of the car, she proceeds to drive Tommy to school like nothing happened. She's telling him things will "be different" when a seagull rams into her windshield. Add this to the list of traumatic things Tommy's had to deal with in his morning. Jess gets out of the car to toss the gull over an embankment and we see a huge pile of seagulls much like the multiple Sally pile-up. My head really hurts at this point.
It gets worse. I'm just going to spoil the ending because I'm still a little mad at myself for watching this.
Because Tommy is upset about the bird blood still on the windshield, Jess is distracted and ends up steering into oncoming traffic. She is thrown from the car, but Tommy and her dead body are still in the wreckage. Strangely, she ends up standing near a taxi driver (who says nothing can be done for them) and asks him to drive her to the harbor.
Then the movie pretty much starts over.
Remember how I said Jess was a little out of it when she met Greg at the dock? Now we know it's because she's dealing with the whole "I killed my son" thing.
Rotten Tomatoes critics gave it 81% on the tomato-meter (out of 37 critics, 30 gave it a "fresh" and 7 said it was "rotten"). I happen to fall in the other 45% of the audience that did not like this movie. I will admit the acting from Melissa was (as always) great. Perhaps it was just that the story idea was too much for my tiny brain to wrap around—the idea of filling up a cruise ship with dead bodies until one different fractal finally lets her get home when she can save Tommy from herself. Granted, it's a new twist on the whole "stalker killer" trope, but I didn't like these characters.
I get tired thinking about Triangle. On a scale of "NO" to "AWESOME" I give it a half-hearted "Meh."
