SYNCHRONICITY (2015)

There is one thing that all time travel movies have in common, and that’s this: none of them actually make sense. That’s the paradox of the time travel film: though each goes out of its way to carefully explain the rules and possible ramifications of time travel, at the end of the day, none of them make sense. Putting aside that time travel, in reality, doesn’t actually exist, and therefore can’t be held up to any existing rigorous scientific criteria, each one featuring an individual traveling back or ahead in time in order to fix a conflict or know the unknowable is, honestly, just making shit up as it goes. It’s examining what is necessary to its own plot, making sure it’s arguably sensible in narrative form, and jettisoning the rest. And honestly, that’s fine. Even the most historically accurate film leans on fiction. Biopics fudge a detail now and then. Dinosaurs have been brought back to life, people. WITH FROG DNA. It’s fine. If those films are allowed to play with reality, the time travel film is certainly allowed the same consideration. But it’s when the time traveling and its ramifications get lost in its own plot that it can get a little frustrating.

From a technical standpoint alone, Synchronicity is beautifully made. Heavily influenced by Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, right down to the incredible synth-based score by Ben Lovett, but also containing bouts of TRON, Dark City, and other titles of the cyberpunk era, no one can say that Synchronicity isn’t audacious as hell. Certainly the first cyberpunk time-travel film-noir romance of its kind, Synchronicity has been brought to life with a very assured and very confident hand by writer/director Jacob Gentry (The Signal—2007, not 2014). From the opening sequence alone, the audience is immediately transported into a time and environment in which they have had zero previous experience. In the same way Blade Runner opens in a very foreign cityscape, replete with merging cultures and disturbing amounts of futuristic gadgetry, Synchronicity, too, plummets the audience directly into the thick of an unusual and dangerous experiment. Who are these three men? What are they doing? Is this sanctioned or have they gone rogue? What’s with this awesome music?

Chad McNight as Jim Beale does admirable work as a man obsessed—first with his potentially world-changing experiments, but later on with the mysterious and beautiful Abby, who enters into his life seemingly at random until that randomness is called into question. He spends much of the film frantic, backed into a corner, and doubting everything—this mostly works for him, but sometimes it doesn’t. Brianne Davis, however, as the noir-required femme fatale, doesn’t quite grasp what she’s supposed to be doing. Her performance as the untrustworthy siren of Jim’s growing infatuation is largely inconsistent; her abilities to emote simply through facial expressions certainly helps in establishing the mystery of her character, but this is too easily counteracted during most of her dialogue scenes, where her hesitance with the role is all too palpable. AJ Bowen, Canada’s version of a young Vincent D’Onofrio, does expectedly fine work as Jim’s co-experimenter, Chuck, who finds himself swept up in Jim’s increasingly complicated life (lives?) as he struggles to save his friend.

Plus this thing’s got Michael Ironside!  He can make your head explode just by WILLING it! I’m not even talking about Scanners, but in REAL LIFE.

Synchronicity stumbles the most (but not doing any permanent damage) in its handling of the actual time travel aspect—considering this is being sold as a time travel film, that understandably sounds alarming. Synchronicity throws a lot at its audience, expecting them to grasp as many breadcrumbs as it can as the film barrels through its narrative. Once one timeline becomes two, which is which, who is who, and wtf all become lodged in your brain, making for a daring but frustrating experience.

Despite these flaws, there is something impressive and impulsively thought provoking about Synchronicity that to outright dismiss the film because of these flaws would be an utter crime. There’s a vagueness, perhaps purposely so, to many of the film’s aspects—like Klaus Meisner’s mysterious company, the future time period in which it’s taking place, the location of the city where it all unfolds—leaving a wake of haze wafting over everything like it’s a dream. The more scientifically minded viewer is going to want to break down the plot’s events to determine who is who at that time, what has changed in this scene being depicted for a second time, what possible implications are to come, but I’m not so sure Synchronicity was designed for that.  Like so many other genre films, time travel or not, the crux of the story is based on Jim and Abby’s growing relationship. Does she love him? Can she be trusted? Will Jim wise the fuck up? Around this dynamic the rest of the film has been wrapped, and whether or not the timeline of events and the science of time traveling makes sense becomes window dressing.

It’s simple, really: if you become engaged by Jim and Abby’s plight, then Synchronicity will prove a rewarding experience. If you’re here for the time travel, then you might find yourself checking your watch.

Taking a page from the book of Blade Runner (and it's five million versions), Synchronicity is impressive to look at. As is demanded by all future-set science-fiction films, the landscape of Synchronicity is cold, sterile, institutional, and impeccably clean. The film leans on blue hues and bright whites because of this, but while also adhering to the dark and shadow of classic film noir. And yeah man, I love this music. The synth-based score by Ben Lovett lovingly skips back in time to the golden age of Carpenter and Vangelis, driving Synchronicity forward, perhaps even atoning for its storytelling flaws in the same way that Daft Punk's masterpiece of a score for TRON: Legacy aids in propelling it from mediocrity to an incredible visual and audio experience.

Synchronicity gets a cautious but still enthusiastic recommendation, if for nothing more than its ambitiousness. How its story will grab you is tough to predict. It's a wonderful technical experience, providing beautiful visuals and an equally beautiful if slightly melancholy musical score. For those longing for more San Angeles ambience, look no further: it's easy to believe that while Deckard is hunting down replicants in the rainy night, just a few blocks over, the events of Synchronicity are unfolding in not just one but two separate timelines. And like Blade Runner, perhaps it will take some time before Synchronicity's story can be truly appreciated.

REVIEW: WORLD OF TROUBLE (BOOK 3 OF THE LAST POLICEMAN TRILOGY)

 

"...But on the core fact there is one consensus: the asteroid 2011GV₁, known as Maia, measuring six and a half kilometers in diameter and traveling at a speed of between thirty-five thousand and forty thousand miles per hour, will make landfall in Indonesia at an angle from horizontal of nineteen degrees. This will happen on October 3. A week from Wednesday, around lunchtime."

Detective Henry Palace returns in the third and final entry in the Last Policeman trilogy, Ben H. Winters' "existential detective series" about one man and the last few cases that fall in his lap leading to the end of days, caused by an asteroid that is on an unavoidable destructive path with the earth. In the first novel, The Last Policeman, Palace's case was his job; in the second, Countdown City, his case was a favor; and in this, the final hurrah for Henry Palace and all the other earthlings, his case is his most personal yet: his sister, Nico, has gone missing, and he's got to find her, desperate to make amends before Maia the asteroid comes along and puts an end to everything. Believing Nico to be in the company of other like-minded folks who are convinced they have found a way destroy the asteroid before it can touch down, Palace, along with his unlikely team of companions - Cortez, a man who'd attempted to kill him with a staple gun in the previous book, and Palace's rescue dog, Houdini - travel the ruined landscapes of America in an effort to find his missing sister. But, as is usually the case, there's more than just a missing sibling. There's two bloody trails leading in and out of an abandoned Ohio police station. There's the barely-alive young girl with the slit throat Palace found in the woods. And there's the missing scientist who may or may not be with this end-of-the-world group of would-be heroes insistent they know how to avert the apocalypse.

World of Trouble is a solid finale for a solid series. The world has continued to regress since the last book, and different factions of people are acting in different ways. Some have taken to the streets in groups of vigilantes to take over stores filled with potential rations; others hide in their homes behind drawn shades, clutching shotguns and nervously peering out windows. Two particular well-meaning teens let all the animals out of the zoo to prevent them from starving to death in captivity, and one of them being immediately cornered by a tiger. These details and the many more flesh out this pre-apocalyptic world and turn it into something both surreal but also entirely believable.

For his swan song, Winters has embraced an almost-The Road type device for his tale, which puts Hank Palace on a rather innocuous task (finding a sledgehammer to bust through a suspicious and newly-installed hatch in a police station parking garage floor), but during which Palace, instead, crosses paths with several different characters, all of whom are reacting to the end of times in very different ways. In prior Last Policeman novels, the characters with whom Palace interacted were all part of the larger mystery - the "point" of the respective novel. But now, instead, there is less of a focus on unraveling a mystery than there is immersing in the drama of this environment. The mystery is still front, center, and fully accounted for, but Winters is instead weaving human experience in and out of Palace's mystery. Each character provides a missing piece of the puzzle, sure, but they're also there to provide something else: humanity.

World of Trouble's ending is bittersweet, and obviously while I won't reveal if the world comes to an end, or if Nico's band of anti-asteroid misfits manage to come through and destroy the means in which the world will end, there's still an ending here:

Hank Palace has solved his last mystery.

Buy it.

READ: THE LAST POLICEMAN

If you were a homicide detective who got the call on a dead body, which, when investigated, had all the makings of a suicide and very little of a murder, would you investigate it, anyway? Would you ignore all the obvious makings of someone having taken their life and investigate it as if the deceased were murdered?

And, if the world was doomed to end courtesy of Maia, the asteroid, which was scheduled to hit the planet in a matter of months, would you still investigate? 

That's the big question at work in Ben H. Winter's The Last Policeman, the first in a trilogy involving Detective Henry Palace, a detective with the Concorde, NH, police department.

Falling within the genres of soft science fiction and mystery, though described as an "existential detective novel" by its author, The Last Policeman is an entertaining and enigmatic police procedural, and while these are always fun, it has the added effect of playing out against the apocalypse, which forces several of our characters to confront the big question: why bother? If the world is doomed to end in six months, why bother going to work, eating healthy, walking the dog, solving that murder? What's it all going to mean in the long-run?

The character of Detective Henry Palace easily fits the mold of what has become the typical investigator. He's hard-boiled, haunted by his past, cynical (though not to the point of indifference), and mostly, just trying to do his job that he's being paid to do: a man has apparently taken his life (not an uncommon occurrence in the months leading up to complete devastation), and Detective Palace dutifully investigates the scene. The "victim," Peter Zell, is found in the bathroom stall of a local McDonald's, his belt tied around his neck, strangled to death. Everyone around Palace seems ready to write it off as a suicide and move onto the next thing, but the scene bothers Palace too much - to the extent that he's willing to become a pain in the ass to his superiors and dismissive of the rules and conduct of a New Hampshire police officer. As is demanded by the mystery/noir genre, nothing is what it seems, and Detective Palace peels back layer by layer of what everyone has labeled a standard suicide, revealing something far more surprising beneath. 

The Last Policeman is thrilling, funny (in that sardonic kind of way), introspective, certainly existential, and haunting. The reader will root for Detective Palace from the start, because even though his task to investigate a suicide as a murder seems like a fool's errand in the face of Maia the asteroid and humanity's growing apathy, it's more comforting to believe that there is someone out there who cares enough to embark on such a quest on which most people have already given up. (Plus he's a kind of a generous tipper, throwing down thousands of dollars for his $15 breakfast.)

The Last Policeman is followed by Countdown City, and the final part, World of Touble, is a brand new release from the author; all three are available from Quirk Books (publisher of Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children.)