Saturday, March 16, 2013

Safety Not Guaranteed (2012)


IMDb plot summary: Three magazine employees head out on an assignment to interview a guy who placed a classified ad seeking a companion for time travel.
Starring Aubrey Plaza, Mark Duplass, and Jake Johnson.

Major spoilers ahead, as my main complaint was the ending.

This is one of those that I can almost guarantee will slide its way significantly down my Flickchart over time, because I'm going to forget Mark Duplass' weird charm and Aubrey Plaza's entertaining character which made it worth watching, and I'll be left with just the dissatisfaction I felt with the rest of it. The romance didn't really work at all - the two characters were great individually, but I never like they worked *together*. The sideplots with other characters were bland and unnecessary.

My main beef, however: the ending wasn't satisfying at all. It's ambiguous, but not the sort of ambiguous that says, "Oh, either it's a slightly happier or slightly sadder ending." Depending on what happened there at the end, the movie *drastically* changes genre. It's either a charming sci-fi romance... or it's a completely tragic story about someone who decided to follow a maniac she was temporarily obsessed with and then they both disintegrated and died. The movie tries to aim us toward the first ending, but without any real answers (including answers like "what the heck was going on with his girlfriend?"), there's still the nagging sense that it could be a completely horrific story and I'm never going to be really sure. That bad taste in my mouth is, I suspect, the taste that will remain six months from now. 2 stars.

Flickchart: #805 out of 1885, below No Highway in the Sky and above Batman.

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