Triangle - Like Bashing Your Head Into Rock
Triangle is a horror flick that came out sometime in 2009, starring Melissa George (who I only know from a small role in Alias, but she did a damn fine job with the character she was given) about this woman who gets caught in a time loop after she's stranded on a ship with some friends.
The following is spoiler-y, so advance with caution.
Basically, they're caught in a storm and their boat is overturned, when suddenly this mysteriously empty ocean liner pulls up alongside them. Visualize me putting bunny fingers around 'mysteriously' and making faces, because it's the most fucking obvious warning that every one of the characters seems to miss, somehow. Like huge, uninhabited cruise ships go roaming the sea to pick up shipwrecked survivors. Please.
But this cast seems to be cool with it (one of the guys brushes it off as a staff prank. As though he's waiting for 800-something passengers and crew to jump out and yell boo). Throughout their adventuring of the ship (which was fairly creepy, I'll give it that), the main character, Jess, has a couple odd moments of deja vu, and is scolded by Main Guy that it's 'impossible' she's ever been in the exact boat they're on now. She doesn't see the need to tone down the crazy, though, and soon after people start dying off. Too soon, you would think, to make the story last, but after Jess (being the last one left alive) fends off the attacker and pushes them over the side of the boat, you're enlightened to the film's quirk: it's all one big loop.
Well, three, to be exact.
And this is where we get to the frustration, because this chick figures out she's in a time loop pretty early on in the movie. She has various chances to change things, and at first it seems like she might (though how she goes about it is a little questionable), but then it hits you that it's not just one loop after the other, it's three, and each of the three Jess Peoples do something different depending on the one that came before them.
Still, there are at least two moments I can think of where she has the opportunity to kill her 'newer' self and she hesitates, even knowing that's what saved her when it was her first time around and inevitably killed her attacker (now her). You begged the masked person with the gun not to kill you so you could swipe their weapon away when they paused? DON'T PAUSE WHEN YOU'RE IN THEIR POSITION. You hid down in the kitchens with only a knife as protection as your attacker paused at the doorway with a gun? HOW ABOUT YOU GO SHOOT HER NOW?
Regardless of all this, she does eventually get off the boat and to the mainland (where she reveals herself to be both a horrible mother and driver. Oh, and also that the time loop isn't the boat, it's her) which is when you discover she was actually in on it from the very beginning. Shock. I suppose this is the writer's idea of an ending with a twist, but I can't help but think if she knew everything that was going to happen, why bother faking all the crap she did? Why not just get right down to the killing? Why bother fighting off the old/new her? They could've joined forces and taken everybody else down.
What I'm saying is this movie was a waste of an hour and half of my life, if only because I wish they'd been smarter about the plot. Yeah, there's a lotta creepy scenes and the idea is great, but it is very much like bashing your head into a rock repeatedly if you hope for some quick thinking on behalf of Jess. If you enjoy the pain, then so be it. She seems to.
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