Tag: choice

400 Words on: Until Dawn (2025)

or, “Buying-In to the Confusion”:
A spoiler-free mini movie review.

3 out of 5

While my wife would call me a “gamer”, I don’t clock nearly as many hours as when I was a kid: life gets in the way. So when I do play, it’s almost exclusively ‘arcade-style’ games that I can disconnect from quickly – physically & mentally – and there must be a Pause button.

Though I can’t attest, “Until Dawn” seems regarded as one of the premier, Western-made, story-driven video games of the previous console generation: a group of disposable teens trying to survive a throng of wendigos, with a branching narrative based on player interaction. “Until Dawn: The Movie” swaps out the choose-your-own-adventure input for a “Groundhog Day” esque time-loop, with some other surprises meant to mimic the discovery a player would get from the game.

My surprise was palpable. Though lacking the original’s star-power (which featured Rami Malek & Hayden Panettiere), the movie’s twenty-something players do a convincing job and, tonically, all five are spotlighted equally throughout the script. The savagery is effective, including a show-stopping water tower sequence & a close-up of a crushed face that gave me “Irréversible” flashbacks. The dialogue isn’t bad either, often breaking the fourth-wall to cheekily address the core plot’s uninspiredness, or the suicidal inclinations of its protagonists to reset the loop & try again.

[cont’d]

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the final straw

The final entry in the “Shotgun Room” trilogy. For mature readers.

“An aging philanthropist experiences first-hand the justice system of a near-apocalyptic future.”

In forty years Roy had been driving, he never had a parking ticket. He had never been convicted of a crime in his lifetime, and his police record was spotless. But in the world of today, that didn’t matter. The socially-constructed walls of political government didn’t work anymore, and people had begun to stray, even if Roy remained a saint: never deviating, never surrendering. He had persevered during the initial food shortages that plagued the middle-classes, and managed to clear the hump when most thought things could only get better. And then global warming hit. His house was paid-off and nested on an embankment that was high enough for the rising ocean levels to wipe out the communities below but not enough to take him with them. They didn’t even get so high as the support beams, but Roy felt no pride in his investment. And when the tide warning was issued, he was no slouch to doing his part: he opened his doors and let in the waterfront refugees. It was the least he could do: he hadn’t been to a Lions meeting since they disbanded in his area. It was too hard to get around anymore anyway, what with his sciatica and his athlete’s foot and, well, he didn’t really feel like talking about it. He just appreciated the company, feeding the displaced families with the canned goods he had accumulated in his basement from years of stocking-up. Sure, when the initial wave was over, he never received a medal, or a commendation from the Mayor, or a pat-on-the-back from any of the bureaucrats who seemed to permeate the halls of the directorate these days, but Roy had been doing his civic duty his whole life and he wasn’t ready to start asking for charity now. He was one of the good ones. The government had no time for the bad ones anymore.

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