26 replies to this topic

[LucidElement]

For those who have seen the movie, what do you think??? the main character just relieves her tragedy because they got swooped into the bermuda triangle?? i feel like im missing something?

[_Only]

Well, now guess I don't need to see it.

[LucidElement]

ohh you do trust me, really weirddd movie. im still trying to figure it out.

[aronn]

I have seen the movie but it best in first half but the end is not so good.there is no good ending.

[BlindMessiah]

That movie sucked. My friends and I watched it and after the movie we had conflicting views about what happened. So we went back and mapped out the various timelines and they don't add up. The main character shouldn't have even existed. I forget her name, so let's call her Betsy. BetsyA is screaming at her son. BetsyB breaks into BetsyA's house and murders her and takes her son. They drive along and have an accident. Her son dies. She witnesses her son's death. She then drives to the dock, with complete amnesia, gets on the boat, they hit a storm and the boat crashes. A big freighter passes by and they climb on board. They get murdered by a masked killer. Eventually BetsyB figures out that the boat is in a time loop. The masked killer is herself in one of the loops. She figures out that the only way she can get off the boat is by killing her friends. She puts on a mask and kills them all while letting herself live to later become what she is now. She escapes the boat and goes home. She finds BetsyA yelling at her son. She kills BetsyA and takes her son. She gets in a car and drives. She has an accident. Her son dies as she watches. She drives to the dock and gets on the boat with no memory of what has happened.

Do you see the problem? She shouldn't even exist. She has no point of origin. She is actually created, fully, as an unaging adult by the time loop. She is a complete separate individual from the actual version of her that she is a complete copy of. It makes absolutely no sense and completely ruins the movie. I strongly recommend against seeing this film. I'd give it a 1/10.

[onetimeposter]

BlindMessiah, on 16 June 2010 - 06:30 AM, said:

That movie sucked. My friends and I watched it and after the movie we had conflicting views about what happened. So we went back and mapped out the various timelines and they don't add up. The main character shouldn't have even existed. I forget her name, so let's call her Betsy. BetsyA is screaming at her son. BetsyB breaks into BetsyA's house and murders her and takes her son. They drive along and have an accident. Her son dies. She witnesses her son's death. She then drives to the dock, with complete amnesia, gets on the boat, they hit a storm and the boat crashes. A big freighter passes by and they climb on board. They get murdered by a masked killer. Eventually BetsyB figures out that the boat is in a time loop. The masked killer is herself in one of the loops. She figures out that the only way she can get off the boat is by killing her friends. She puts on a mask and kills them all while letting herself live to later become what she is now. She escapes the boat and goes home. She finds BetsyA yelling at her son. She kills BetsyA and takes her son. She gets in a car and drives. She has an accident. Her son dies as she watches. She drives to the dock and gets on the boat with no memory of what has happened.

Do you see the problem? She shouldn't even exist. She has no point of origin. She is actually created, fully, as an unaging adult by the time loop. She is a complete separate individual from the actual version of her that she is a complete copy of. It makes absolutely no sense and completely ruins the movie. I strongly recommend against seeing this film. I'd give it a 1/10.

I found this part of the movie problematic as well.  But I'm confident that if multiple viewers could see this, this cannot be a hole in the plot but an intentional mystery.  Consider this, when the film begins we assume that this is the ultimate begining of the storyline, but we see later in teh film that this is runthrough X judging by how many duplicate items there are laying about (scraps of paper, lockets, bodies, sea gulls).  So we know that this has been going on for awhile.  Isn't it safe to assume then that the begining is not how the begining actually began? We know one thing for sure, the actual begining of the event contains the mother being a b**** and cleaning up her son's mess and is forced to change clothes.  But in the actual begining she wouldn't be murdered so she would collect her son then and drive somewhere.  Somehow then she "cheats death".  This part of the movie is also slightly foggy.  Does she cheat death by having her other body being dead at the scene of the accident (as shown in the film) or is there some other way she cheats death?  Unfortunately, the first mentioned is the easiest to comprehend but makes the story and impossibility, so, assuming the writer wrote a solid story the latter mentioned unknown way of cheating death must happen.  So this must mean that we don't know how she origionally cheated death and she appears at the boat oblivious she cheated death.  Then, after the first run through the story would take hold.  The real problem with this otherwise brilliant story is the unknown way of her cheating death in the first place which lands her in the situation.  Anouther interesting thing to keep in mind is that the other surviving female of the yacht wreck doesn't recall how the man who cheated death cheated death in the first place, which may be a homage to the actual story as in it doesn't matter how it started. Food for thought.

Edited by onetimeposter, 18 August 2010 - 06:06 AM.

[BlindMessiah]

onetimeposter, on 18 August 2010 - 06:04 AM, said:

Unfortunately, the first mentioned is the easiest to comprehend but makes the story and impossibility, so, assuming the writer wrote a solid story the latter mentioned unknown way of cheating death must happen.

Beliefs should be formed around facts, not facts around beliefs. You believe the writer wrote a solid story. There is absolutely nothing to indicate this. Every piece of evidence indicates that the writer didn't even understand his own story.

[shanghai21]

I think it is actually a very profound movie. The logic is emotional in nature though, and so the viewer has to be able to recognize torment. Ultimately, that is all the movie is about - eternal torment - hence the Sisyphus reference.

The way I see the story is as follows:
There is a single mother with an autistic son. She resents her son on some level for making her life difficult - this is manifested in the movie through emotional and physical abuse. She works as a waitress, and there is a handsome customer who clearly wants a relationship with her. One day he asks her if she and her son would like to go sailing with him at 8:30 the next morning. She agrees. The following morning she is running extremely late due to the responsibilities of being a single mother who has to take care of an autistic son etc. etc. Her watch reads 8:17. She is rushing to get packed and get out the door. He spills his paint and she hits him. Finally in the car, she is racing to get to the marina on time. In her distracted state she veers into oncoming traffic, gets hit by a truck and both she and her son are killed.
This is what happened in real life. (this is all taken directly from dialogue in the movie)

The movie begins at some point, any point, in her eternal torment. If the viewer needs to ground the narrative in reality, I suppose you could conceptualize the movie as taking place in her head as she lays bleeding and unconscious at the scene of the accident - but really, it is a visualization of hell (or purgatory, if you're an optimist). She never made it to the boat in real life. In real life, the other people presumably went sailing without her. But the movie is not depicting real events in the real world. It is depicting the main character coming to terms with being the "killer" of her son, and experiencing that anguish over and over again. The other characters define the parameters of her torment, but they are not actually dying repeatedly in real life. They are stage props, originating from her expectation of real events before she died, but only serving in the space of the movie to force her to repeatedly, and nightmarishly, understand herself as a killer.

In this sense,  the movie is just a post-traumatic, infinitely repeating, emotional cycle. If you can imagine how a woman who beat her son (and resented him in the very moments before she caused his death, for making her late, but also in a deeper sense for keeping her from really being able to go sail away with this handsome customer unencumbered) might be punished in a Greek-mythological version of hell, this movie shows that punishment...

Profound guilt leads to denial - she wakes up on the sailboat with only the faintest memory of what she is doing there. This denial deepens as she tries to figure out who is killing her friends on the ocean liner. She eventually realizes that she is the one doing it, but she is still removed from this version of herself - her "killer side" is still external. But she cannot shoot herself because she won't fully understand the reason she needs to do so until she gets back to her house (keep in mind that these events are extensions of her emotional torment, and that therefore the aspects that are "locked" (i.e. they will always board the boat, she will always shoot them in the theatre, etc.) are reflections of the formula for her specific emotional punishment - like Sisyphus and Tantalus. In this part of the "process" she is only psychologically ready to kill as a martyr, with the knowledge that killing her friends could save her son.)

Psychologically speaking, she is able to take on the role of killer only because she has fused it with the role of martyr/savior. But the fascinating part is that the torment builds from here. After she embraces her (rationalized) identity as killer, replacing her immense guilt with immense willpower, she is able to go overboard.

But then when she gets back home she is confronted with the truer, deeper source of her guilt - that she was a bad mother. She attempts to destroy that part of herself - in order to protect her son? Maybe. Out of hatred for herself? Definitely. But in her desperate attempt to get rid of the body/escape from the nightmare with her son in tow - she is confronted with the final, most devastating part of her torture - having to remember that her self-absorption caused his death. And it will cause his death over and over and over again for eternity, in the cage of her torment. It is her boulder that keeps rolling back down.

The absurdity in the story of Sisyphus is that he believes his task is possible. Every time he rolls the boulder up the hill he desperately wants his efforts to pay off - but this is exactly what keeps him tormented. He could just as easily sit down on the boulder and not try at all, just as the woman in this movie could bury the other version of herself in the back yard and make her son a grilled-cheese sandwich, but there is a fixation on the completion of the impossible task that causes her to fail every time. The movie attempts to enter into this cycle, to show the awakening of her guilt (for example, the younger guy trying to strangle her), the emotional structure of the cycle, and ultimately the punishment (killing her son, again) - followed by a resetting of the punishment where she shows up at the marina.

I think this is what the writer was getting it. My only complaint is that the actress should have been more anguished (less dazed) as she stared at the car accident - and the "driver" who showed up could have been a bit more sadistically encouraging. But again, that depends on whether you read it as some sort of hell, or some sort of purgatory. To be honest, the whole process seems like hell to me, but the actress/director played it more like purgatory: she remains determined and the movie leaves open the possibility that she can indeed figure out a way to break the cycle.

I have enjoyed trying to figure out what exactly would break the cycle, but the movie does not seem to provide a solution. Or maybe it does but I just didn't catch it. Going only on what is shown in the movie, she seems compelled to reenact every step of the cycle, which is why it seems more like hell to me, and why I think the director should have played it this way after the car accident (more torment, less hope). But this gets into philosophical territory (if hope can be a form of punishment, is it effective if it never flickers?).

The only "out" I can see is somehow stopping the irrational self-absorption. The whole movie she wants to get back to her son, to "save" him, but if she could just accept that he is dead and take responsibility for it, the torment would be over.

All in all, I thought it was a really impressive movie. I don't know why people didn't like it more... maybe because this movie builds its logic out of emotion, which many people find contradictory? I've actually never seen that approach before, though, and I thought it was brilliant. I wonder if women might understand this movie better than men, because of the emotional nature of the logic/meaning... ?

Edited by shanghai21, 12 September 2010 - 02:47 PM.

[Wookietim]

LucidElement, on 08 June 2010 - 05:32 AM, said:

For those who have seen the movie, what do you think??? the main character just relieves her tragedy because they got swooped into the bermuda triangle?? i feel like im missing something?

It can't be that because she was the reason she went to the triangle anyway. I took it as she was in some form of purgatory or something like that...

[zoli80]

shanghai21: Thanks so much for your explanation about the movie! Just now I have watched Triangle for the second time. The first time I saw it, it was a shocking experience. I waited a couple of months and now I decided to watch it again. And I kind of had an idea in my mind about what this movie might be about, but I couldn't really put it into words. While watching it for the second time I had this one word echoing in my mind: purgatory. That Jess is an unrest soul, who tries to fix her life, tries to get right with her conscience after being a bad mother, and causing her son's (and her own) death. So, in my mind it's kind of a mix of purgatory and hell. It's hell, because it's eternal, but it's purgatory, because it sort of gives her the hope that she can change things. But in reality she can't.
So, after watching the movie again, I was looking for a forum where I can discuss the film with someone, and maybe someone can help me put the mosaics together, because the film had such a big impact on me.
So, thanks so much for your comment. It helped me put in words what I sort of already had in my mind. Thanks!
Have a nice day!


Zoli
Hungary

[shanghai21]

Thanks Zoli!

It is so nice to hear that someone thought the same things! And it's crazy that you wrote to me EXACTLY 1 year after I posted this comment! Unexplained mysteries!!!

It sounds like we might enjoy similar movies... can you recommend any movies that I probably haven't seen (maybe Hungarian movies?) that are really thought provoking???
If you want to see another really good movie, check out Los Cronocrímenes.

Thanks for the message!
Ren

[zoli80]

shanghai21: Yeah, I realized yesterday night too, that I wrote exactly 1 year after you wrote your comment.
I will check out the movie your recommended. If you haven't seen it, I would encourage you to check out The Machinist with Christian Bale (directed by Brad Anderson), but I would guess you have already seen it.
Unfortunately there are no good Hungarian movies, or if there are, I don't know them. There is one that I like ("Presszó" or "Presszo"), but it's a totally different type of movie, and I don't think they have English subtitles for it anywhere.


(By the way, Triangle had such a big impact on me, that since I saw it for the first time, I've had a movie still from the movie on my computer as a wallpaper. )
http://www.imageserv...40e46708103.jpg

Zoli

[alex_heneineh]

Shanghai21: I read your explanation and I must say, I am impressed and very much agree with your reasoning. I do have a question, thought, and hope you can provide me with an answer. In the movie, right after the part where the girl with the red hai (Sally) dies and plenty of Sallies are found dead next to her, she looks at a scene where we see 2 other copies of herself fight each other, and one of them dies and is thrown into the water.
I just wanted to say this because during the movie, she passes through all the copies of herself, and goes through every scenario except being the girl who is thrown off the boat after bein killed, as well as the copy that killed and threw the body into the sea. I just wanted to know why she didn't pass through that, and I hope you can provide me with an answer.

[Vaise]

shanghai21 you have cleared that movie up for me in one fell swoop, kudos. But i still dont like the movie ^^

[zoli80]

alex_heneineh: The movie might not show the story from the perspective of her being the girl thrown in the water, but that's still her. Since it's an eternal loop, the movie cannot show us the whole picture (that would be impossible), it only highlights a segment of the loop, so we could understand, it's an eternal torment for Jess.
By the way, when towards the end of the movie Jess wakes up on the beach, that actually happens to her RIGHT AFTER being thrown in the sea. She actually sees the garment in the water that she wore when she had the mask on herself.