phenomynouss

Seeing that this was apparently a feature-length remake of a short film definitely explains a lot, because this film drags on way too long and is just too boring for what it is.

And what it is is just kind of pointless gore and child-killing. Nothing much deeper than that.

But the absolute biggest and worst issue is that the film is just boring. It probably worked better as a short film, but much like the pointless remake of "Cargo" that took an absolutely amazing 7 minute short film and turned it into a feature length long and winding grinding series of pointless sidequests.

My guess is that's what happened here.

I was actually looking forward to this film at the start. I immediately picked up on the use of a new style of slang like someone would imagine being used decades in the future, and the ideas that were brought up by the "Tangle" were intriguing to me.

But the main problem is that the slang dialogue isn't clear, and the plot is too detailed for the audience to keep up with, and not even in a stereotypical "audiences are dumb" type complaint. Even in instances where I was able to immediately catch on and understand the slang being used, the split second it took me to figure out the meaning of a slang term was enough to completely distract me from the rapid-fire dialogue progressing the plot, especially as we get random strings of barely coherent poetry inserted in between dialogue blocks for seemingly some reason that isn't discernible.

The vast majority of the first 40 minutes are basically this; people talking to each other as fast as they can in as flat a tone as they can manage in between occasional bursts of anger while trying but not quite managing to lay out a murder mystery in the process.

Sometimes as well, the slang becomes too overwhelming. It makes sense in casual conversations nowadays for people to occasionally use slang like "cringe" and "hear me out" and "vibes", but the thickness in which it's applied in this movie makes some scenes not just incomprehensible but unrealistic even by its own standards.

As an example, many of the scenes with nonstop slang being thrown around have the same sense as full grown professionals saying things to each other like "She gyatt my skibidi till I ohio, bro"

This happens too many times for me to be able to keep up with this film and beyond even that, the story quickly brushes past the entire concept and setup of the Tangle and into the more bland aspects of murder mystery such as love trysts and affairs and the like.

This film has an idea it wants to do, playing off the now overused trope of "astronauts in trouble on space station, need to pull off some wacky science/engineering miracles" and not particularly doing anything new or special with it.

Mostly it takes way too long to reach this point of The Big Plan. Not a lot of time went into fleshing out the backstory of the setting beyond a very unimaginative title card in the beginning telling us basically "capitalism wrecked the planet and now corporations rule the world"

There's several other story elements that get played with around this setting, but none of it really amounts to anything. It's there but no one cares long enough for it to mean anything. You could easily remove the entirety of the backstory and just set it in modern world with functioning nation states and it wouldn't change the film at all.

Putting it simply, this movie isn't good enough on any level. By now I've seen so many of these types of films that every time one of the characters says or does something mildly unusual I begin to suspect they are secretly plotting against the group or going rogue. But in this film it's sometimes not clear if this is actually happening, or they will just forgive each other and keep going on with their work.

This movie isn't bad; it's just not good. It's a patchwork of other films like "I. S. S" (2023), "Life" (2017), "Stowaway" (2021), even a bit of "Gravity" (2013) that have all done what this film has done, and done it way better.