Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
Picture it: you’re in some kind of post-apocalyptic scenario where the air outside is so toxic that you can’t experience it without gas masks. Suddenly, three masked men break into your shabby hovel, drag you and your ladyfriend out of bed, and in your struggle to escape, you get tossed down a flight of stairs and you die … only to immediately wake up in your bed, moments before the home invasion starts everything up again.
The film ARQ, which began streaming on Netflix after a premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival this September, wastes no time before plunging the viewer head-first into its sci-fi premise. Our central couple Renton (Robbie Amell) and Hannah (Rachael Taylor) are being terrorized by a trio that look like they just stepped out of Panic Room; there’s poison atmosphere outside, and there’s some kind of device in the basement that’s electrified enough to have killed the fourth intruder just by touching it. And oh, right, Renton keeps getting killed and waking up again. WHAT IS GOING ON? That’s the puzzle that has to be solved in ARQ.
When it comes to solving that puzzle, it helps if you’ve seen other movies. Renton’s awake-kidnapped-resist-death-awake sequence is a time loop that’s going to be intensely familiar if you’ve seen, say, Edge of Tomorrow, where an alien-fighting Tom Cruise gets caught in a time loop where every time he gets killed he has to wake up and try again; or even something like Source Code, where Jake Gyllenhaal inhabits the body of a man about to die who can help solve a terrorist plot. In both of these films, the protagonist takes advantage of this death loop and uses it to perfect a plan of attack. That’s mostly how it works in ARQ as well. Every time he wakes up again, Renton knows a little bit more about his attackers. Are they after him because of work he’d done with the shadowy, authoritarian organization that appears to run the wasteland in the future? Is one of them a spy? And what does that big electrified device in the basement have to do with the time loops. If ARQ is brazenly derivative of the movies that have come before it, at least they’re really digging into the concept.
As our central couple, Robbie Amell and Rachael Taylor mostly prove why their agents fight so hard for them to be cast in everything. I am on the record as being thrilled that after years getting bounced from one terrible ABC television series to another, Taylor found the perfect role as Trish on Marvel’s Jessica Jones. It’s a part that allows her to show her surprising depth and toughness. In theory, she gets an interesting role in ARQ, as Hannah is the character we keep finding more and more about. She’s like … wait, did anybody watch the Maze Runner movies? Statistically, some of you must have. She’s like the the Kaya Scodelario character from the Maze Runner movies. Every 20 minutes or so, you find out something new about her character, and it always makes you like her less.
Robbie Amell, meanwhile, holds the movie on his broadly attractive shoulders. It’s sometimes hard to take him seriously, because even drabbed up for the apocalypse, he looks like he was created in a laboratory in order to be a multi-purpose Handsome Guy. Which isn’t to imply that he’s not talented. He’s another one who appeared to have found a role that suited him, but being the ninth lead on The Flash was probably never going to work for a guy who will be able to star in college sex comedies for the next ten years if he feels like it. Post-apocalyptic mind-benders ripping off Edge of Tomorrow don’t feel like the best use of his talents, but he does a fine job with ARQ.
ARQ honestly works really well as a Netflix movie. You didn’t have to pay for it, so you won’t feel like you’ve been cheated if you don’t like it. The relative TV-ness of the stars won’t seem so out of place. And most importantly, you can feel free to back up and watch something else over again because you missed one of the explanations for the time loops. Good for streaming!
