Rating (2 out of 5)

I was in between items yesterday, and came across ARQ on the Netflix list.  I really have to stop watching the Netflix shows, but I tortured myself again.  ARQ didn’t start out as torture, but really fell off at the end.

The movies starts out with a couple in bed, and are woken by people breaking into their bedroom and then taking them downstairs to the basement.  This is a dystopian future, where virus killed off most of the world’s population, and an evil Corporation (is there ever a story with a good one) is trying to take control of the world.

So the couple are tied together and these guys threaten them, and leave them to think about their proposal, give them the money (scripps) or die.  Our hero of course unbinds himself and tries to breakaway.  He ends up telling them where the scripps are and then they kill him.

He wakes up in bed again.  He is stuck in a time loop, because of an energy device he designed that is in the basement.  He gets a little smarter about what he is doing and goes through a couple of loops.  On the last loop, he learns that the girl he wakes up with is in cahoots with the masked men.  But now she is remembering the time loop.

They go through more loops and we learn one of her compatriots, is actually a merc with Evil Corp.  This keeps going through some more time resets, to basically where everyone has a memory of what is happening.

Finally, we get to where we think we are going to have a breakthrough, and then they realize, that they have been through this many more times and the loops is longer than they thought.

It ends with the hero trying continuing to try and get the breakthrough the loop and tech his tech to the “good side”.

I was with them and was thinking that this was a hidden gem, but then they looping kept going without and real development.  Then when everyone knew they were looping it just got out of hand.  Then the fact that they never got out of the loop didn’t give me a sense of purpose on watching the movie.

I was also confused by their expedition outside of the house.  They really didn’t have a gas mask, and kept sharing one back and forth.  It was a strange scene.  Then the run across a circle that of glass/petrification that is supposed to be the size of the area stuck in a time loop.  Why would a time loop form a circle like that just so we were confined to the house.  Aagh.

Then, there is always the mystery to me of why people don’t have backups.  I have a backup of my stuff, and I am not designing a power source that could save the world.  You think he would have a disk he could give her, send her on the way, an